Mathieu

Mathieu grew up immersed in art. It was simply the environment he knew. Raised in New Orleans, he spent his childhood in his parents' galleries on Chartres Street, where paintings, sculpture, and ideas were part of everyday life. Openings were ordinary evenings. Artists were dinner guests. Before he could name a single technique, he knew what it looked like when a stranger stood still in front of a picture and forgot the time.

His parents ran La Belle Galerie, remembered as the first gallery in New Orleans dedicated to the work of African American artists, and his father later spent a decade directing one of Royal Street's oldest galleries. The family sits deep enough in the city's art life that a 1990 portrait of his parents by the photographer Roland L. Freeman is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Mathieu grew up inside the frame. He just never planned to make one.

The photographs presented here are drawn from years of wandering through the French Quarter, the Marigny, neighborhood bars, music venues, late-night streets, and impromptu gatherings. They were never intended for exhibition or publication. Mathieu photographs instinctively.

“It's how I see things. The light, the figures in the shadows, the way it bounces off walls and people's faces. I thought everyone saw it too.”

His photographs are fragments of a city seen from within, by someone who has lived its rhythms his entire life. They are lived observations rather than staged or purposeful ones: small moments of emotion captured through his lens, finding beauty in his version of the ordinary.

For Mathieu, photography has never been about preserving what New Orleans looks like, or should. It is about preserving what a moment felt like, not simply what it looked like.