Residents and Visitors: Twentieth-Century Photographs of Louisiana January 30, 2011

'Residents and Visitors: Twentieth-Century Photographs of Louisiana' is the eighth collaborative exhibition drawn from the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC), and the first to be based solely on institutional photographic holdings. With over one hundred examples by dozens of photographers on view, the exhibition offers not only glimpses of Louisiana and its people throughout the twentieth century--primarily in and around New Orleans--but also hints at the depth and breadth of each museum's photography collection. The premise for the exhibition, photographs made by those who live or lived in Louisiana for their professional lives and those made by men and women just passing through, might seem to portend pictures splitting along certain lines. One might wonder how those who spend relative moments of time in a place hope to make pictures as thoughtful as those photographers steeped for decades in the culture, the architecture, the humidity of Louisiana. A short answer might be that the visitors' pictures are meaningful and thoughtful in ways that suit photographers rather than an art-viewing public, or the specifics of geography. The inability to offer a neatly packaged answer is part of the question's mystery and attraction, and central to this exhibition.