New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence

New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence (2nd edition) focuses on the interiors, furnishings, art collections, and gardens of a handful of creatives in New Orleans in the 1990s. Including bohemian artists, architects, preservationists, activists, antiquarians, restaurateurs, and teachers, all living outside the American mainstream. They tolerated crumbling plaster, exposed lathe, and sagging galleries in exchange for communal festivity and joie de vivre.

Photographer Richard Sexton documented how and where they lived; what they hoarded, and worshipped. In this updated second edition, historian Randolph Delehanty weaves together the history of New Orleans from the fragments he saw in those photographs. Together, they explore in words and images how the combination of climate, a strongly European and Catholic culture, African influences, and the revelry of Mardi Gras have created a modern ambience in New Orleans, unlike that of any other city in America.