by Emma Boyce

Take out your wide lens because PhotoNola’s 7th annual photography festival begins November 29th, and there is a lot to see.  Beginning in 2006 in the wake of one of the biggest hurricanes to hit the Gulf Coast, PhotoNola came together out of a group of motivated, talented photographers, who sought to carry on the New Orleans’ bustling art scene despite devastation.    

July 7th, when Joan of Arc was acquitted of heresy charges, 25 years too late (1456), when sliced bread was sold for the first time by Missouri’s Chillicothe Baking Company (1928), when President Reagan announced the nomination of who later became the first female U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Arizona’s Sandra Day O’Connor (1981), The San Fermines Bulls run in Pamplona, Italian film director Vittorio De Sica (1901), Ringo Starr (1940) and Shelley Duvall’s (1949) birthdays, and Gone With the Wind’s Scarlet, actress Vivian Leigh’s death (1967). And today? Voila:

The people of New Orleans are not shy about their opinions. Ask about food, or music, or politics, and there will be some tallkin'. But, sometimes, we're also listenin'. In our bookstores, museums, theaters, cinemas, universities, and, of course, our bars, great names lecture, workshop, curate, and debate every day. Welcome to the Speakeasy. The weekly roundup that lets you in on who’s lecturing, speaking, signing, screening, appearing, Q&A-ing, and workshopping all over town, so you can have your culture and eat it too. The week's highlights include a photographer and a sex psychologist.

From Press Street's Room 220

"I was nine months pregnant and due in less than a week when Hurricane Katrina blew into the Gulf. In the early hours of August 28, 2005, my husband and I loaded up our small truck with two cats, two dogs, two crates full of negatives, all our important papers and a few changes of clothes. We evacuated to a motel in southern Alabama and tried not to watch the news." So begins the artist’s statement in Jennifer Shaw‘s book of photography, Hurricane Story, which will be released by Chin Music Press in July.