Big Bites of Street Culture

Photographer Michelle Elmore’s three new books.

- Jennifer Odell

There’s a black and white photo of Glen David Andrews, clad in a crisp suit and brass band hat, hanging in a breakfast and lunch joint called The Hummingbird in the Northern California town of Fairfax. The restaurant’s owner, Michelle Elmore, took the picture one night more than a decade ago under her porch light in Treme.

Like the name of her restaurant (homage to the now defunct Hummingbird diner on St. Charles Avenue) and the crawfish omelets and chicory coffee she serves there, the photo serves as a reminder of the community that welcomed her and inspired her work documenting New Orleans street culture beginning in the late 1980s.

It’s also one of thousands of images slated to appear in a new set of art books due out in April. In Come See About Me, Elmore’s camera captures the faces, outfits and moves she saw most Sundays on second line parades across town. Let’s Go Get ‘Em is culled from her work with members of the Mardi Gras Indian community. The third book, Ya Heard Me, shines a light on the blinged-out grills and daily life moments of local rappers and their crews in the early to mid–’90s.

Published by Artvoices, the set serves as a mid-career survey for Elmore. As Larry Blumenfeld explains in the foreword to the books, the images collected within them speak to the photographer’s development as a person as much as they reflect her artistic path.