Turning a Look

Introduction by Brooke Sauvage

You’ll often hear the word ‘magic’ relative to New Orleans, frequently as a starry-eyed utterance from the uninitiated. Some of the earliest recorded art, to our knowledge, centered on the transference between image and reality—or rather, what one might call magic: the primitive cave art found in southern France, for instance, showed animal likenesses punctured by arrows, which may have been believed by their creators to increase the chance of success for those who hunted them.

So, too, can we situate much of this magic in the culture of revelry upon which the city was founded (though to say the city “was founded” denies the existence of those who lived here long before colonial exploration: Bulbancha, “the place of many tongues” and the seat of Chitimacha territory, was a bustling point of trade long before it became the French Market). When Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville first landed 60 miles south of what would come to be called New Orleans, he and his crew called the camp Pointe du Mardi Gras, as they had arrived on Lundi Gras—Monday, March 2, 1699—the day before Fat Tuesday.

Masquerade, one might say, gave physical expression to Carnival, derived from the Medieval Latin carne vale (farewell to the flesh): a practice by which “a new face and attire allows an individual to transcend everyday life, to escape the prosaic and immerse him- or herself in the magic and power of Mardi Gras.” Masking became common practice in early celebrations, in which the anonymity garnered by wearing a mask permitted its wearer an escape from the obligations determined by visual markers of identity. This piece of costumery, so small and yet so significant, allowed its wearer to transform into something beyond the ordinary into something extraordinary.

In conjunction with (or in defiance of) European, or white, celebrations of Carnival, organized groups of Black revellers called Mardi Gras Indians embody and elevate the tradition well into the present day: their suits—each one a year-long labor—an explosion of ostrich feathers, elaborate beadwork, headdresses and ruffles. According to oral histories, free people of color dressed in a manner inspired by indigenous tribes in appreciation of those who helped them escape the plantations. It was almost as if, by replicating native dress, the Mardi Gras Indians manifested the wildness—and ultimately the freedom—of those who helped them escape the brutalities of slavery.

That is to say, when you dress up as a demon poodle, you become a demon poodle, so to speak. The magical, mimetic transfer allowed by costuming—where one becomes the very thing they dress as—has existed since time immemorial, irrespective of time and space. In her photography, Léone Julitte reflects her community of New Orleans’s contemporary magic makers—queers, performers, costumers, creatives, sex workers and associates in the post-Katrina landscape—in their project of self determination, in their quest for timelessness, in their disruption of systems demanding mass-marketed homogenization, to great and liberating extent.

I have a friend who says that a costume for Mardi Gras day is akin to combining “a melted crayon with the six-yearold version of yourself,” and another who wearily proclaims, “What random shit am I going to glue to my face today?”

Julitte’s photography implicitly invites us into the world of costuming, which may hinge on Mardi Gras but ultimately swirls into every weekend of the calendar year. We’ll see the bar, the warehouse party, the non-permitted parade, the pagan holiday, the photo shoot, the Thursday night disco. In her photos, we see wigs, glitter, hair, a random piece of trash, the jacket found at the thrift store, face paint, tooth paint, acrylic nails, peculiarly shaped eyebrows, otherworldly eyelashes and sparkle, color, boom, pop; evoked through masks, more trash, tulle, pattern clash, monochrome, headdress, flower crown, fake and real, fishnets, feathers, rhinestones, prosthetics, elf ears, deformity; conjuring the mythological, archetypal, tarot, astrological, abstract, literal, fruit, vegetable, fried chicken, superpower, demon, goblin, witch, beast, goddess, creature, clown, corporation, dream and nightmare; to the varying effect of ethereal, glamorous, disgusting, disquieting, transcendent, absurd, hilarious, nonsensical, pretty, invisible, visible and nearly any other contradiction the imagination could conjure. In other words, the best rule is to break the rules; this tradition of costuming is rooted in paradox, with flowers for anyone able to imagine what has thus far remained unimagined.

Take, for instance, Julitte’s photo of Jake, dressed in a ball gown made of trash bags, emblazoned with the glib Have A Nice Day, Thank You! Jake dribbles powdered sugar down his slick, plastic bodice; the enfant terrible incarnate enjoying a beignet at one of New Orleans’s longest-standing sanctuaries, Cafe du Monde. Jake’s attitude, insouciant, shows a Black person, visibly feminine, pink eye shadow and blue fingernails, in the throes of utter indulgence—to what end? Pleasure without consequence. Delight in the absence of punitive foreboding. Some sliver of utopia that we grasp for the most vulnerable among us, an identity as of yet emergent, a person gloriously, imperturbably unscripted.

In another photo, in collaboration with Britt Burchfield, Julitte delivers an ultimate caricature of drugstore femininity: a clown with cartoonish, overlarge lips, a surfeit of curlers (atop the head, as cuff and bangle), amongst pink trash bags floating, improbably, stage left. The Mississippi River makes a foreboding backdrop in gray; an outstretched hand, disembodied, extends a conciliatory compact mirror. Our gal orates into a pink, corded phone, apropos of nothing. Her chest is emblazoned with the words Southern Belle.

Julitte takes us through the looking glass and into a world of world making, where image empowers and transforms first the subject, then the viewer. Representation gives way to self determination in a hellscape of intersecting apocalypses. These images seem to say: Your script no longer binds me. I will tell you who I am. Because everything you say you are… is just a costume.