Seeking an Open Life: Photographs of Lafcadio Hearn's Japan

In Seeking an Open Life, the Historic New Orleans Collection invites contemplation on the less-than-obvious connections between two cities across the glob from one another—Matsue, Japan and New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. What ties these two places together, besides their respective infusions of folkloric cultures and mythology, is the 19th century journalist and author Lafcadio Hearn. 

Hearn's decade in New Orleans (1877–87) was spent chronicling the city's Creole culture for the Daily City Item and the Times-Democrat, after which he embarked across the world for a city that is chronicled in the contemporary images of photographer Everett Kennedy Brown. Brown's capturings of Japan's southwestern Izumo district explore the multifacted relationship between these cities and their adopted son, Hearn. The prints' physical characteristics and connections to the journalist are all the more highlighted by two 19th century processes used to produce the images: wet collodion and collotype.

Seeking an Open Life will be on exhibit from October 10 to December 31. hnoc.org/exhibitions.