• A Smith Gallery
• Deadline: September 3rd 2024
• Prize: Exhibition + Sales + Publication
• Theme: Open
• Entry Fee: Yes
• REGISTRATION: CLICK TO APPLY
“Alexander Starlight sits on the bank of the Mississippi River every evening in August. He eats garlic and burns cinnamon incense to keep away the mosquitoes. When it’s dark enough to see the lights on the green crenellated awning of the Cafe du Monde he gathers up his cameras and whatever belongings he brought with him and walks two blocks to the bar at Tujaque’s restaurant. He first orders a Sazerac with Cognac, instead of Rye. Then he orders a Spanish red wine. He drinks standing at the bar, looking out the window at the nightly parade of humanity walking past, drawing what he sees with pencil and charcoal in a small sketchbook that he always carries with him. At ten sharp he pays his bill and walks to Bourbon Street, to the back door of Galatoire’s restaurant to meet his brother. They walk home to an upstairs apartment on Esplanade and share the trout and redfish and jambalaya or shrimp that his brother collected through the evening as a cook. He gets up each morning, except Sunday, at six-thirty, drinks coffee and plans his shoot for the day, later calling one or another model, requesting the necessary costume, but choosing the camera to use by spinning a bottle on the floor and accepting where it points. His brother opens the gallery downstairs at ten-thirty and stays until two-thirty, when he goes to work at the restaurant. His sister works the gallery from three until six. She is good with tourists. He takes over sitting in the gallery until seven-thirty, when he locks up and walks down to the river. He is known for his twilight photos of tugboats and the steamboat paddlewheeler, The Creole Queen. Alexander’s father had been a relatively famous abstract expressionist painter. He was a companion of William Faulkner during his time in New Orleans. He was shot and killed in front of St. Louis Cathedral one August by a cuckolded husband. Alexander only kept one of his paintings, a rare representational work. It is of an empty small boat alone on the river at night, the lights of the French Quarter barely illuminating it….” From “Only to a Memory Unmoored” By Franklin Cincinnatus
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