New Orleans: A Personal Perspective.  All cities are unique, instantly recognizable by anyone who has lived in or visited one of them. And yet New Orleans stands out for a number of reasons. Most notably because it is an island of diversity surrounded by a Southern ethos that disdains outliers, rejects joie de vivre, and limits personal freedoms. It is a city filled with music and food and dancing in the streets. Little is off limits and the alcohol flows with abandon while the blues pours out the doorways of hundreds of dim and dingy bars.

There is also an intrinsic age to New Orleans, an age that is difficult to find anywhere else in North America. A place where the Choctaw gathered for thousands of years to trade along the shores of the mighty Mississippi, where people’s souls were enslaved and traded, where immigrants found safety, except for some whose lives ended by swinging from a tree. Where current businesses flourish in buildings constructed 300 years ago and where jazz was born.

Over the past 25 years Tobin and wife, Rachel, have been visiting this extraordinary city, sometimes with camera in hand and sometimes without. The photographs exhibited are based on a very personal experience of New Orleans, capturing the play of light and shadow on the buildings and reflections in the ever-present water that permeates the entirety of the city. The images also encompass the human character that epitomizes the essence of New Orleans.

About Perspective gallery: Founded in 2010, Perspective Group and Photography Gallery is a not-for-profit community-oriented cooperative of fine art photographers whose purpose is to promote fine art photography. In addition to monthly artist exhibits, the gallery produces a guest speaker lecture series, monthly artist talks, an annual international juried exhibition, an annual invitation show, an annual juried exhibition for Chicago area photographers and an annual juried exhibition for Chicago area high school students.