Michelle L. Elmore de Elmore, Michelle L.

Michelle L. Elmore

Elmore, Michelle L.

I started visiting New Orleans barbershops on Friday afternoons. Many of the subjects in my monograph “Ya Heard Me” were Gangsta’ Rap artists. I began documenting their day-to-day lifestyles in the neighborhoods they were from. In the two years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, I shot thousands of photographs of these young people. I realized the moniker “soldiers” by which they refer to themselves was not an affectation. The average life expectancy in this demographic is 25 years. They speak, live and interact with an urgency that I would imagine exists on battlefields. I have personally witnessed over 50 shootings. One day, one of my subjects was shot through the chest. The bullet passed through his body, missing both his heart and spine by fractions of an inch. Apparently, the slug was so hot that it cauterized the wound on the way through and it didn’t bleed. He went home to lie down for a few hours and was back on the street the next day.

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Notă biografică

At a certain point, I got fascinated with doing close-ups of people¿s gold teeth, the ones you see in the bounce and rap scene in New Orleans. My favorite portrait is a guy called Money Mike. He told me that he worked for Cash Money but a lot of guys make that claim. Anyway, I ran into him on the street one day and he let me photograph him. I knew there was something special about his gold teeth. But I didn¿t figure it out until I was living in Brooklyn, New York for a few months. My good friend Buster from New Orleans came to visit me, and he had a full set of gold teeth. We were in a McDonald¿s and, after he smiled, the girl behind the counter asked him; Where are you from? He told her; I¿m from New Orleans, and he said it as if she should have known. Buster explained to me: In New Orleans, they file off the original teeth and replace them with gold, instead of a fake grill that only covers the teeth. In the old days when you flashed a smile with solid gold on the street it meant that you had real money, could do real business. And it still means something tangible. That¿s the essence of what my portraits represent. My focus from that moment on was close-ups of these grills. When I concluded the series The Museum of Natural History in London included images in an exhibition titled: History of Diamonds.