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Friday Night Grind.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans.
Photographs by Jackie Brenner, texts by Josephine Sacabo and George DeWolfe.
Shine Media Group / Fresco Fine Art,
Sydney / Albuquerque,
2006.
96 pp.,
black-and-white illustrations,
Publisher's Description
The old world character of New Orleans is at once elegant, cultured, and
refined, yet dilapidated, boisterous, and vulgar. To document these
abundant eccentricities, Jackie Brenner is drawn to subjects that expose
the night people of her hometown with Bourbon Street and her strip clubs
as the perfect tease. To gain entry into this darkened, shadowy world was
difficult, almost impossible. Friday nights, better known as date night in
the Crescent, were chosen to penetrate the fantasy, harshness, and humanity
of the stripper's world; to become a witness to the reality of their
'otherwordly' existence. These are women who find the amount of money that
can be earned too hard to pass up regardless of the consequences. The women
are a little bit of everyone just trying to make it through the day using
whatever resources available. This project began expecting the strippers to
be mere objects and it finished knowing these ladies as human beings.
Jackie Brenner's enigmatic images now serve as historical record of the
time before Hurricane Katrina's devastation created another obstacle in
the path for all of us who are addicted to the character of New Orleans.
Just as these women struggle to survive, so will New Orleans, as her
people fight to preserve, rebuild and insure the intregrity of her
survival.
About the author:
Jackie Brenner, a fine art documentary photographer, studied at the New
Orleans Academy of Fine Art School of Photography. Her work has been
exhibited in several galleries, won prizes in juried shows, is in numerous
private collections, and is in the permanent collections of the New Orleans
Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Museum of Fine
Art, Houston.
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