mardi gras is one of the best things in this world: it combines the amazing spirit of new orleans with music, friends, children, old people, booze, crawfish boils, beads, screaming, laughing, stumbling, masks, strategizing, saying ‘sidewalk side’ a lot, lights, floats, confusion, koozies, dancing, costumes, and a willingness to endure some pain and lose some sleep. time exists on another plane—each parade seems to hold a universe. in many ways, it makes me feel more alive and more like a child than anything else i know; i have never felt such pure joy from catching a plastic cup. it is something i find impossible to explain to those who have never been. and i could cry just thinking about how i have to wait a year to go back.
Abby and I had a wonderful Mardi Gras in New Orleans; I took very few photographs, and I didn’t worry whether I would ‘capture’ any given sight, sound, event, or preserve it, document it, substantiate myself with its digital evidence. It was a release from my duties as a nervous, unpaid curator of the self, a documentarian of vain trivia. I felt joy for nearly all of our time there.
In the past, however, I worked a bit harder. I’ve taken some photographs of Mardi Gras with which I’m happy; I think they manage, here and there and despite their technical clumsiness and under-culled quantity, to present some of the visual beauty of the carnival parades. This beauty —and the vital, bawdy, syncopated music, and the thrill of kindly crowds, and much more— is a larger part of why New Orleanians love Mardi Gras than the clichéd debauchery of topless tourists and Budweiser beads.
In any event: here are some better Mardi Gras photos, mostly from 2009 and 2010. You should go next year.
You need to add “second line” to the list of the amazing, and then discover the heretical beauty of the creux du vieux to truly grasp the beauty of Nola for all it’s beautiful voodoo & Choctaw “walk-to-the-beat-of-our-own-drummer” joie de vivre. But lovely photos here. Truly lovely.
