New Orleans Cultural Traditions

Upon moving to New Orleans in 2008, Charles Lovell began documenting the city’s second line parades, jazz funerals, and social aid and pleasure clubs, capturing for posterity Louisiana’s rich cultural heritage. From this unique New Orleans Black cultural tradition he is sharing 21 photographs in this article. Following them with his camera became his passion, and his color photographs have documented over a decade’s worth of weekly parades. The parades evolved from the funeral processions sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs that arose in the 1880s to provide burials for Black Americans at a time when insurance companies did not offer them coverage, with elements inspired by military brass bands. Even further back, they evolved from West African dance circles and Congo Square dances held on Sundays, the enslaved workers' afternoon off. For a time, the dances were banned, deemed threatening to the city’s White inhabitants. Rich in ceremony and ritual, the parades exuberantly express the right of Black Americans to publicly parade while preserving a vibrant cultural and artistic heritage.

Charles Lovell

Born in Chicago, Charles Muir Lovell lives and works in New Orleans. He holds an MFA and a BS in photography, from Central Washington University and East Texas State University. Lovell began photographing as a young man traveling throughout Europe and South America. He continued his photography practice during his twenty-plus years as a museum director/curator, a career that took him from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and to the Deep South, everywhere finding distinctive cultures and subjects to photograph.

Lovell has long been passionate about photographing people within their cultures. Upon moving to New Orleans in 2008, he began documenting the city’s second line parades, social aid and pleasure clubs, and jazz funerals. An earlier series based on religious processions in Mexico, “El Favor de los Santos”, was a Rockefeller Foundation–supported international traveling exhibition. It resulted in a book published by the University of New Mexico Press, Art and Faith in Mexico, in 1999.

His photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, are found in several permanent collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Historic New Orleans Collection, and can be seen at CharlesLovell.com and on Instagram @charleslovellart. He received the 2020 Michael P. Smith Documentary Photographer of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

Lovell has also developed a series of photographs called “Language of the Streets” that he began in Venice, Italy, while an artist in residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in 2006–2007. He returned to Venice for a second residency in the fall of 2015 and returned in 2021.