“The swamps, live oaks, the architecture and people of Louisiana spoke to me in a way I had never imagined possible,” says Covington-based art photographer Harriet Blum.
Over the last four decades, Blum with her distinctive style has created an extensive portrait of the natural beauty of the Louisiana landscape as well as images of New Orleans musicians and street life, architecture, cemeteries, and monuments in St. Tammany Parish that once celebrated its health-giving properties but is now witnessing rapid population growth and the inevitable loss of small-town life. Her earlier images of that area are visual memories of what was.
Particularly striking, however, are her softly focused hand-tinted infrared photographs of Metairie Cemetery tombs, crypts and funeral monuments that cast an eerie spectral glow that are beautiful but at the same time a bit unsettling. They give vision to the place often called City of the Dead.
Blum’s unique painterly images appear as dreams in a mist thanks to her signature approach to photography, which she describes as “a style uniquely my own.” That said, she also credits famed surrealist photographer Jerry Uelsmann, “who opened my eyes to photography as an art form,” and the late but celebrated New Orleans photographer Michael P. Smith, who “fined-tuned my darkroom skills and opened the door” to her photography career.
Born in Philadelphia, Blum grew up in Miami and moved to New Orleans in 1971 after college. Between freelance jobs, stints as a newspaper photographer and commission work, Blum has driven the back roads and side streets, hiked through the woods or paddled canoes up and down the rivers and through the swamps and forests, capturing images of the landscape, ancient oaks, and abandoned buildings. Not being a native of Louisiana perhaps has given her a keen awareness of the South Louisiana landscape. And then there is New Orleans itself.
“New Orleans,” she says, “is such a unique place and that uniqueness was my initial inspiration to become a photographer.”
Over the years, that career has brought Blum numerous national and regional honors and awards, including the Best in Show award at the Bethesda Row Arts Festival in Bethesda, Maryland. In addition, her work is now included in public and private collections across the nation, including, among others, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Mobile Museum of Art.
For additional information, visit harrietblum.com.
