LOW HUSTLE HOT CENTER: Contemporary Canal Street in Downtown New Orleans

"Low Hustle Hot Center" is an updated inquiry into one the South's grandest - and oddest - streets. Rich in description, impressionistic in scope - the black and white photographs reveals a complex threshold of social space.

Low Hustle Hot Center: Contemporary Canal Street in Downtown New Orleans

Anyone vaguely familiar with New Orleans knows of its downtown thoroughfare, Canal Street. One of the widest streets in the US, it long ago served as a “neutral ground” - or a common space between the Creoles of the French Quarter and the Americans further upriver. Today, of course, that phrase is applied to all street medians in the city, but Canal Street still operates as a grand threshold of social space. It is heavily traversed by a diverse group of both locals and tourists moving between the quarter and the business district and beyond. The range of businesses is just as mixed between luxury hotels and high-end shopping venues - and cajun themed convenience stores and vape shops.

This ongoing series of photographs called Low Hustle Hot Center: Canal Street in Downtown New Orleans, incorporates a wide array of photographic styles: from portraits to streetscapes to architectural studies, in both minute details and sweeping vistas. The black and white film medium brings the work in conversation with the rich, historical imaging of New Orleans. As a series the images strive to describe not just the physicality of the urban environment and its inhabitants (however fleeting), but also the complex psychological tone of the area, too. Of specific interest is how the social fabrics and economic dynamics along Canal Street have evolved in its present moment to become one of the South's busiest and most diverse, urban arenas.