Project Description

Artist Profile

Keith Calhoun

KEITH CALHOUN & CHANDRA MCCORMICK are documentary photographers living and working in New  Orleans for the past four decades. They use photography to provide visual testimony to  the lived experiences of African American life in the US South. Whether chronicling religious ceremonies, cultural traditions, the visual histories of  Lower 9th Ward or tracing the legacies of slavery through sugarcane laborers on  plantations, sweet potato field harvesters, or life at Angola, Louisiana’s State  Penitentiary, their images bear witness to the social realities of Black life—historicizing and archiving the rich unique traditions and deep-rooted attributes of Louisiana culture.  Since the early 1980s, Calhoun and McCormick have engaged photography as a site of  social activism—documenting, illuminating, and conveying the struggles and  celebrations of the Black American experience.

Artist Profile

Keith Calhoun

KEITH CALHOUN & CHANDRA MCCORMICK are documentary photographers living and working in New  Orleans for the past four decades. They use photography to provide visual testimony to  the lived experiences of African American life in the US South. Whether chronicling religious ceremonies, cultural traditions, the visual histories of  Lower 9th Ward or tracing the legacies of slavery through sugarcane laborers on  plantations, sweet potato field harvesters, or life at Angola, Louisiana’s State  Penitentiary, their images bear witness to the social realities of Black life—historicizing and archiving the rich unique traditions and deep-rooted attributes of Louisiana culture.  Since the early 1980s, Calhoun and McCormick have engaged photography as a site of  social activism—documenting, illuminating, and conveying the struggles and  celebrations of the Black American experience.