Community Spotlight Series: L. Kasimu Harris
Community Spotlight by Michael Allen Zell
L. Kasimu Harris for the South's Most Stylish Cities feature in Southern Living, photo by Cedric Angeles.
It’s often the case that for an adult to find their joy, balance, and purpose, one must look to seeds in childhood. For L. Kasimu Harris, named the 2022 Documentary Photographer of the Year by Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, interest in photography began at an early age. “My dad was a hobbyist,” he recalled. “He had a Canon AE-1 35mm camera, which I still have. There are pictures of me holding it. I must have been about two.”
Harris quickly brings it back to music, both for an early interest in the sound but also to the visual. “I fell in love with jazz at a pretty young age. I played trumpet in the 3rd grade and then picked it back up in the 9th grade. Wynton Marsalis came to our church for his CD “In This House, On This Morning.” Eventually I got his book “Sweet Swing Blues on the Road.” There are a lot of photographs by Frank Stewart, and my interest started to grow. I love “Downbeat” magazine as well as the Blue Note label with the Francis Wolff photographs, so even before I was a photographer, I started looking at it that way,” he said.
When Harris’ music career started faltering in high school, he had what he termed “…a quarter-life crisis. I went to Jazz Fest with that Canon AE-1 and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I stopped. I don't know why. Photography for me has had several stops and starts. Once I got to college, I had a camera that belonged to Delfeayo Marsalis. He thought he lost it, and I never told him that he didn't, so I had a Olympus 35mm camera. I used it as one would do for Instagram, just a lot of snapshots. This was 1998.”
His renewed focus, as for so many, came about from the 2005 catastrophe. Harris reflected, “I was in Graduate School for Print Journalism, but I had to TA for a photographer. We came back home 45 days after Hurricane Katrina. I had my notepad as any reporter would. Had a tape recorder, but it was really the camera that helped me navigate coming back to such a traumatic situation and dealing with that internal trauma. The camera hasn’t left my hand since then. I still write. I wish I wrote more. I have plans to write some long pieces soon to get that muscle going.”
L. Kasimu Harris, “Close The Door”, 2005.
Most have come to the quality of Harris’ work via his photographs of classic New Orleans Black bars featured in the “New York Times.” This was an idea born of inspiration, necessity, and vision. “In graduate school, I started looking at the work of Birney Imes, who did a book on juke joints, and Roy DeCarava, a Black photographer who documented Harlem. I have a notebook where I write all my ideas down. I scribbled that at some point in life I thought I could do the Black bars in New Orleans like how Birney did juke joints. I realized that I'd been to most of those places as a kid. It was an idea, because they were so ubiquitous to me,” he said.
As it turned out, a changing New Orleans, specifically on St. Bernard Avenue, was the catalyst for Harris. “In 2017 or so, I was hanging out and heard a brass band playing at a club called Next Stop. I went in there just to see this beautiful kind of thing,” he enthused and then mused, “A year later that same bar was called The Goat, and it was devoid of all Blackness. It was like institutional erasure. That's when I knew I needed to start the idea that I had in my notebook a long time ago. I intentionally started it in 2018.”
L. Kasimu Harris, "Ya Crown Ain't Big Enough,” Big Chief Bo Dollis of the Wild Magnolias, First and Last Stop Bar, 2020.
Harris makes sure to note the universality of his key subject matter. “While the project started in the 7th Ward, it’s not just about the 7th Ward. I spent a lot of time Uptown particularly at Sportsman's Corner. I've done work in Pittsburgh. I've done work in L.A. A little bit in Mississippi. These bars, while very unique in New Orleans, because we practice culture in a way that other people don't, they still connect throughout the African diaspora. When I was in Los Angeles at a place called The Living Room, it felt like a bar in New Orleans. So many people were from the South, and they were listening to straight up jazz.”
When asked if he views what he’s doing as preserving, to document before it's gone, he agreed. “For sure. I like ethnography. What Zora Neale Hurston did as far as capturing language. She has a book for kids about the tall tales of Black folk. Alan Lomax in Mississippi recording older Blues musicians. I look at it very much so in that way. My background is a journalist. Journalism is the first draft of history. We can't tell our stories from the grave. A lot of it is just about realizing what's truly important.”
Oftentimes things that are seen as common or come from a lower socio-economic area are considered unimportant, but Harris sees the genius in them. To his disappointment, when he tried to look up Next Stop, there was nothing online about it. No one thought enough to go there, talk to the owner, and document it. He emphasized, “Culture definitely emanates from these Black barrooms. They were places of respite. You could go there and be treated with dignity. My cousin Al Jackson talks about the civic qualities of it, where you could make a deal happen. You might not be able to go to the golf course, but you could go there, make things happen, and have that community of Black leadership. You hear back in the day where Dutch Morial would go to the bars. Got to get those votes.”
L. Kasimu Harris, “Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges” series, 2018-
Insight is often best offered by those who lived or witnessed it. Another motivation for his project was when he wrote about Ms. Linda Green, The Yakamein Lady and she rattled off names of bars that were shuttered. “She said something interesting, which still holds true today,” he recalled and hit point by point, “People retire, or a lot of them didn't want their children to go into the bar business. That's why you don't have those succession plans. People just wanted a better life or what they deemed to be a better life for their kids. It’s like sometimes the butcher doesn't want his son or daughter to become a butcher. Maybe you go to college, and that's just not your interest. So, they don't get passed on like that. Some people don't own the building. It's a lot of things. A lot of the bars were fronted but not owned by Blacks. I was told the Mob owned a lot of them. I just have a unwavering commitment to uplift these places and get their stories told. It's truly important.”
As far as what’s to come from Harris, look forward to at least one of his next steps in keeping with his preferred subject matter. The bars in his photographs have a great look from an era. His eye takes in all of it, particularly the ads. He’s ready to bring the background to the foreground. “There are so many layers and levels to those ads back then. How they were perceived. Subject matter. The individuals in them. Who the audience is. Plus now, our view of all that stuff,” he said.
Harris remembers the ads standing out to him from a young age. He guided to the array of 70s Black magazine ads posted in his Joan Mitchell Center studio, where he is currently an Artist-In-Residence, and added, “When you go to some places, they still have original ads. For an upcoming project, I'm using it as inspiration to reimagine these. There'll be alcohol ads, but not necessarily advertising alcohol. I'm still iterating it in my mind and going back to being a writer to play with words. Text and images, shall I say. Visions and verbs. That's what's going on with that, so I have them up on my wall in the studio. I’m getting ready to start shooting the ads. I've been doing preservation for quite some time now. I want to start to include sustainability.”
To learn more about L.Kasimu Harris, visit www.lkasimuharris.com