In conjunction with the citywide PhotoNOLA Festival, NOMA will host the keynote address by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, a husband-and-wife team of New Orleans-based photographers born and raised in the Lower Ninth Ward who have documented Louisiana and its people for more than 35 years.

Please RSVP for limited seating in the NOMA Auditorium.

The work of Calhoun and McCormick spans the music culture of New Orleans, including brass bands, jazz funerals, social aid and pleasure clubs, and Mardi Gras Indians. They have documented river baptisms in rural Louisiana and African American laborers, ranging from sugar-cane scrappers to dockworkers and longshoremen at the Port of New Orleans. As proponents of social activism through photography, Calhoun and McCormick have been granted rare access inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola beginning in the 1980s and continuing to today, resulting in a series they titled Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex. In 2014, their work was selected for the 56th annual Venice Beinnale. They have been featured on the PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning, National Geographic, Aperture, and The New Yorker, and their photographs have been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Louisiana State Museum, and The Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum, among others. Learn more and view works from their portfolio by visiting the couple’s website.

Calhoun and McCormick will sign copies of their book Louisiana Medley in the Museum Shop following the lecture.