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Oak Avenue, Wormhole Plantation - © Richard Sexton

Photography Then is installment one of a three part essay devoted to the practice of photography and its relative place in popular culture and the art world over the last several decades. This essay is a bit different for me in that it isn’t about technological innovation or aesthetic issues per se. It’s about the evolution of the practice of photography—what it means to the lay person, how it’s faring as a profession, its impact on society. I’m focusing on an evolution that’s happening so slowly it isn’t perceptible day to day, but the evolution reflects huge changes once you look back over several decades and project forward into photography’s potential future.

My personal history with photography began seriously when I bought my first SLR in December 1972. I decided almost immediately that I wanted to be a photographer. By the late 70s I had a fledgling...

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Richard Sexton is a fine art and media photographer whose work has been published and exhibited worldwide. He has been published in magazines such as Abitare, Archetype, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Photographer’s Forum, and View Camera. His most recent book, Creole World, published in 2014 by The Historic New Orleans Collection, is the 12th book he has authored, co-authored, or photographed. Previously published titles include a monograph, Terra Incognita: Photographs of America’s Third Coast, published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, in 2007. Chronicle Books also published the best selling New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence in 1993 and Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road in 1999. To date Sexton has over 300,000 books in print. In 1997 Sexton curated the exhibit Sidney Bechet: A World of Jazz 1897-1997, which commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the influential jazz musician’s birth. Sexton has had major solo museum exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, FL, (2015); the Pensacola Museum of Art in Pensacola, FL (2015); The Historic New Orleans Collection (2014); the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida (2014); the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, MS (2010); the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2007 and 2005); among others. Sexton’s photographs are included in the permanent holdings of The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LSU Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art, Frost Art Museum, Pensacola Museum of Art, and numerous private collections. In 2014, Richard Sexton received the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Also in 2014, he was an award recipient in American Photography magazine’s Latin America Fotografia 3 annual.
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