Dogs in My Life
Description
Raised in New Orleans, John Tibule Mendes lived most of his life in a two-room house on Broad Street with his beloved mother and their dogs. Only after his death in 1965 was it discovered that this lonely and socially awkward man had spent much of his free time documenting beautiful and unusual scenes of early 20th century New Orleans. His glass-plate negatives, discovered after his death in the attic of his house and published here for the first time, capture subjects typically ignored by the photographers of the era. This collection is exceptional from both documentary and aesthetic perspectives, presenting what could accurately be classified as photographic folk art. The photographs in Dogs in My Life are complemented by excerpts from Mendes’s self-published autobiography of the same name. Mendes’s sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious voice adds another layer to these remarkable images.
Author Bio
Between 1916 and the mid-1930s, John Tibule Mendes (1888–1965) was a consistent and curious observer of life in New Orleans. His photographs are archived in The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and teacher living in New Orleans. He is the publisher of Lavender Ink, a small press devoted to contemporary poetry. His poems have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, and his essays and theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.
