Dithyrambalina and That Whole ‘Faerie-Anarchist’ Vibe
Several months ago I photographed a really interesting assignment in my own neighborhood for the New York Times. The Music Box, a ’shantytown sound laboratory’, is a musical house built from found materials that serves as a prelude to the building of ‘Dithyrambalina’, an interactive sculpture in the form of a three-story house. Co-curated by the Brooklyn-based street artist Swoon, The Music Box is a platform for collaborating artists to develop the instrumentation that will eventually be built into the Dithyrambalina’s walls, ceilings, and floorboards.
Campbell Robertson wrote a great piece describing the first performance I attended called A Symphony of Floorboards, Pipes, and Stairs, and several of my pictures accompanied his story in a slideshow titled House Music in New Orleans. I really liked the way our story came together, and meeting a bunch of cool people throughout the process was an added bonus. I went back to photograph the third and final performance at the Music Box at the invitation of New Orleans Airlift, the organization that made the whole project possible.
Today’s edition of New York Magazine features a travel guide to New Orleans that focuses on the Marigny and Bywater districts that we call home. TitledĀ ‘The Urbanist’s New Orleans‘, the article refers to the neighborhood as part alt-college town, part faerie-anarchist commune, and takes readers on a crash course through galleries, bars, and restaurants on the downtown side of the French Quarter. It’s a funny glimpse into the ways that the rest of the country thinks about New Orleans these days, and they used one of my pictures (below) to lead the entire travel feature.
I added an edit from both Music Box performances to my portfolio site here: Recent Work: The Music Box.






