Silvestri started photographing post-Katrina New Orleans in the weeks after the flood, beginning with the remains of her own childhood home. Before long, however, she turned her camera to the people she encountered around the city, people returning to find out what was left of their communities. She photographed individuals of all different ages and in all different settings before zeroing in on the high school.

Some of the subjects display typical adolescent haughtiness, others a familiar vulnerability. Most are pictured wearing their school uniforms. But all of them, seen through Silvestri’s lens, reveal their own personalities and some reflection of their own New Orleans and their experiences in it.

“These are the kids people saw on the news right after Katrina,”

says Silvestri. “I wanted to put faces on them as individuals.”

Lisa Silvestri is a native of New Orleans, and studied fashion and photography in New York in the 1980s.  She later designed her own children’s clothing label, Ida Ltd., which sold worldwide. She created Ida’s advertising images, and the work gave her a great deal of experience photographing children. Since 1997 she has worked exclusively in photography, and her images have run in such publications as Self, Martha Stewart Living and Money.

Lisa Silvestri – Fine Art Photography

THE NEW ORLEANS PORTRAIT PROJECT

Friday  April 3, 2009  Opening Party  –  6 to 10 PM

wine reception – free  event

This show, first presented at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art is a collection of 60 portraits of New Orleans teenagers that Silvestri completed at John McDonogh High School in the Esplanade Ridge neighborhood. Made using a large-format view camera and a 19th-century finishing process, the black-and-white portraits are stark but carry a natural elegance. There are none of the usual Katrina cues of damaged homes or broken urban landscapes to frame the portraits’ context. Rather, the viewer is left face-to-face with these young New Orleanians, left to decipher and wonder at what they might have seen and what they might hope for today.

See more images here:  www.thejohnmcdonoghseries.com