Michelle L Elmore Ya Heard Me

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.

“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