Death Magick Abundance, the first photo book by New Orleans photographer Akasha Rabut, is the culmination of her nearly ten-year collaboration with the people of New Orleans who invited her into their lives to photograph them.
Her images celebrate the city’s thriving culture through the pink smoke of the Caramel Curves, the first all-female black motorcycle club; the Southern Riderz, urban cowboys on horseback in the city streets; the second lines’ exuberant fashion, music and style; and life that seems to spring from dilapidated corners.
Rabut writes: “Witnessing how the people of New Orleans adorn themselves in a dizzying array of hallucinatory fashion, observing how music and style disseminate from the streets instead of from a supposed elite influencer class, and cultivating friendships with the people who comprise the heart of this book—these experiences have forever changed my life.”
The title echoes the spirit of the second line parades, a tradition sprung from funerals that is central to the social lives of many New Orleanians. In his essay in the book, New Orleans photographer Sam Feather writes: “Second lines are a source of power. In a city where so much is oriented toward outsiders, the parade is not for sale, not advertised, not sponsored by corporations, not accompanied by souvenirs. Despite very tight budgets, you will see some of the most creative dressing in the world at the second line. It’s a stage and a dance club and a neighborhood block party all walking by in the afternoon. It’s a tiny economy.”
Accompanying the images are oral histories as told to the New Orleans Neighborhood Story Project, a nonprofit collaborative anthropology organization. The book’s texts include candid excerpted conversations with the Caramel Curves and Southern Riderz.
Shanika “Tru” McQuietor, co-founder of the Caramel Curves, shares: “We based our club on women’s empowerment: women knowing that they can do something that people thought they could not do. When I was growing up, and even now, the main image in this country of a woman and a motorcycle was a white woman riding on the back, hanging onto her boyfriend. It was not a woman who was handling her own bike. We are just trying to show women: “If you want to ride a bike, go ahead, get your bike and ride it!”
And as Devence, a member of the Southern Riderz, explains: “The Club’s been running about twenty years now. We’re horse advocates. If it’s not a culture make it a culture. And if it’s a culture, make it stronger. We have thirty-one members, who are in their twenties through their fifties.” The club empowers young people. Devence’s wife Kris says, “I’m a high school teacher, and I tell my students, ‘My husband rides horses, and if y’all want to ride, he’s not opposed to you coming over.’ I have a student who is in the club with them because he was serious about it.”
Seeking to interpret and preserve a sacred cultural heritage while redefining itself against a constantly shifting landscape, Death Magick Abundance is a conduit for the love and unending beauty of New Orleans and its people to flow to the rest of the world.
“More than any party, more than any song, more than any team or dome or disaster, New Orleans is her people. Take me out of the equation and you have a book about those people: the ones who persevere, the ones who survive, the ones who thrive and live to transform this city again and again, filling New Orleans with her vitality and strength.” – Akasha Rabut
Akasha Rabut is a photographer and educator based in New Orleans. Her work explores multi-cultural phenomena and tradition rooted in the American South. Akasha is also the founder of Creative Council, a mentoring program for young people in New Orleans pursuing careers in the arts. Akasha’s photographs have appeared in museums and galleries around the world. She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Akasha Rabut : Death Magick Abundance
With a foreword by Sam Feather, and an afterword by Anne Gisleson
Published by Anthology Editions
$40.00 (US)
£35.00/ €38.00 (EU)
ISBN: 9781944860271
