Our New Artists Series/Meet Frank Relle/New Orleans Photographer

FRANK RELLE(please click on name)
NEW ORLEANS PHOTOGRAPHER

This new artists came to my attention via a friend of my brothers who collects Frank Relle's work.  Bill knew I had recently been to New Orleans and shared his interest in this wonderful artist.  
Relles' photographs are rich and mysterious, especially those of the houses and architecture of New Orleans.  Some of the most captivating are post Katrina.  His work and back ground are  so interesting I thought you might enjoy him as well. 

Nightscapes by Frank  Relle from google image

Choctow by Frank Relle New Orleans photographer/post Katrina

His images are powerful and the lighting makes them dramatic.  They make you feel as if a Tennessee Williams play could be happening here and some one will step out and yell, "Stella!!!" The characters are present, you can feel them or sense them....that is the essence of New Orleans you can feel a lot you can see, you can feel the presence of the history of things as though it is a living breathing thing.  Relle captures that.  The clarity of the photograph, the detail in each piece, lit as well as another...every object is given equal attention and that makes it quite masterful because it draws us in and we want to know more and we want to know the story...

If you had seen New Orleans right after Katrina and the sheer mass of destruction it would have been overwhelming to you, as it was to me.  I felt as if I was walking through the streets of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, not the Big Easy.  It was impossible to tell the whole story on tv, and if you thought you got a sense of it looking at a newspaper or the news, you were wrong.....only by being here could you get the feeling of neighborhood after neighbor hood, street after street, for miles and miles, complete and utter ruin...sights sounds, smells, and the desolate ghost like streets, tic tack toe graffiti on house fronts saying who lived or died.  My partners Father spent a month with us, his home flooded.  The rest of her family was displaced to Texas and Conneticut. Lives were lost, lives were changed, and a city altered forever.  It was one of the worst natural disasters in the United States since the San Fransciso 1800's Eathquakes.  Someone had to record it in a way that would grasp its enormity and inconsolable loss, Frank Relle has done that.  It is not the totality of his work by any means, but that he did is important, very important. His pictures capture, what we cannot say in words.

Clouet by Frank Relle/New Orleans photographer....from google image 

A special thanks to Dr. Bill Lavely for introducing Frank Relle's photography to me and therefore to you.