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These off-site photo shoots make me feel like I have a backstage pass. For instance, every year at our annual concert with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, I go up in the balcony of St. Louis Cathedral. At first I’m just doing my job, concerned with getting the best shots possible, but then the music starts and I’m floating like all the saints painted on the walls around me. It’s thrilling and surprises me every time. In October 2011 I got permission to shoot from the balcony of the Cabildo, to get an aerial view of the solemn funeral procession for Archbishop Philip Hannan. There have been a few instances where it wasn’t my intention to get behind the scenes, but I just started talking to people and
things happened! I was shooting the dinner event at the Hotel Monteleone that concludes THNOC’s annual Williams Research Center Symposium, and the next thing I knew I was on the rooftop getting some twinkly nighttime views of the city.
But for now I’ll be back at my desk or in the studio, looking forward to the next field trip. While I wait maybe I’ll remember that bus trip to Port Hudson. It was a crisp February day, strolling with the group and snapping pictures, learning about the Civil War and soldiers and battles. And as I walked a trail I turned my camera toward the sky through the bare tree branches and took a peaceful, present-day picture of blue and gray. —KEELY MERRITT
STAFF NEWS New Staff
Lindsey Barnes, database manager. Heather Green, reference assistant. Laura Jordan, docent. Nick Borkowski, Lea Young, Diane Finley, Wayne Hanley, Ian McCormick, Scott Noren, Erin Royal, and Elizabeth Vegas, volunteers.
Changes
Eric Seiferth is now assistant curator/ historian.
In the Community
In October, Senior Librarian/Rare Books Curator Pamela D. Arceneaux and graphic designer Nancy Sharon Collins delivered a joint presentation at the WRC for attendees of the American Institute of Graphic Arts Design Conference. The lecture, “Law and Lawless in New Orleans,” showcased some of The Collection’s more salacious pieces of graphic media.
Chris Cook, Kevin Harrell, and Robert Ticknor participated in a panel discussion at the Gulf South Historical Association (GSHA) conference in Natchez, Mississippi. The panel was titled “A Quarter Century of Modernity: Conflict, Disease, and Expression in New Orleans at the Dawn of the 20th Century.”
Curator Howard Margot gave two lectures in September: he presented “The Odyssey (So Far) of New Orleans’s French and Spanish Colonial Archives” to members of the Louisiana Historical Society, and at the GSHA conference he presented a lecture about two of The Collection’s online databases, the Collins
C.	Diboll Vieux Carre Digital Survey and the 1926 Surrey Calendar.
In October, Mark Cave and Howard Margot presented a lecture about THNOC at the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge, in celebration of Archives Month.
Publications
Robert Ticknor wrote an article,
“The Famous French Quarter Entresol,” for the November 2015 issue of Preservation in Print.
Winter 2016	19