Courtney Asztalos is interested in how we are seen: how we are surveyed by others and technology and also how we present identities before a camera. Work from her project entitled Bourbon Street was included in the Culture Share: New Orleans in Photographs exhibition in Moscow which you can learn more about by reading this previous blog post.
For over a year while living in New Orleans Asztalos would venture into the French Quarter and make photographs of individuals participating in the cacophony of tourism and consumption taking place on Bourbon Street nearly 24 hours a day. Bourbon Street is considered the last vestige of the famed Storyville District, where brothels and cribs once lined sixteen square blocks–the same neighborhoods E.J. Bellocq would have traveled with his view camera to photograph sex workers in the early 1900s.
Asztalos approached her project using both intentional and candid portraiture, accomplishing the latter by incorporating still images pulled from a live camera feed’s archive of the street activity at Bourbon and St. Peter. Asztalos was also interested in her own activity being surveilled as she captured her subjects on the street below the EarthCam. Surveillance photography is a topic that Asztalos is interested in exploring because she feels not many people are yet aware of its ubiquity or history which is something we will delve into in a later post.
Ryan Sparks, editor at Southern Glossary, a great resource for contemporary southern art, interviewed Courtney Asztalos in a wonderful post that explains more fully her process of image making for this series.
neworleanslouisianaphotographydotcom 
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