Overview

"I started visiting New Orleans barbershops on Friday afternoons. Many of the subjects in my monograph ""Ya Heard Me"" were Gangsta' Rap artists. I began documenting their day-to-day lifestyles in the neighborhoods they were from. In the two years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, I shot thousands of photographs of these young people. I realized the moniker ""soldiers"" by which they refer to themselves was not an affectation. The average life expectancy in this demographic is 25 years. They speak, live and interact with an urgency that I would imagine exists on battlefields. I have personally witnessed over 50 shootings. One day, one of my subjects was shot through the chest. The bullet passed through his body, missing both his heart and spine by fractions of an inch. Apparently, the slug was so hot that it cauterized the wound on the way through and it didn't bleed. He went home to lie down for a few hours and was back on the street the next day."

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9780998748412

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Ya Heard Me, the third collection in Elmore's New Orleans trilogy, contains the most recent of her New Orleans photographs. These focus on a rap and bounce scene that extends a rhythmic revolution which began more than a century ago in New Orleans and defines anew the beat for this country's cutting edge. Elmore focuses squarely on the grills of gold teeth these rappers and bounce artists flash - outlandish and defiant declarations of style within a hostile and threatened environment. - Larry Blumenfeld of the Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Michelle L. Elmore arrived in New Orleans in 1989, immediately after suffering a personal loss. A decade later, she was living in the city with her young son Jack Marley, their lives centered around the people, places, sounds, sights, rituals and rhythms captured in her Trilogy of monographs. She left New Orleans in 2005, after the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina resulted in flooding because of the levee breach. She had $69 in the bank and had lost many of her personal possessions. But she was fortunate because two weeks earlier she thought to pack up and move her negatives. Her search through those 12 salvaged boxes yields these images. They document the friendships that, for Elmore, transformed alienation into a sense of community, family. They suggest joy and pain in elegant balance and they pay tribute to the city that turned Elmore in the artist she sought to be, and that lent her art meaning.

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