Richard Sexton, a native of Atlanta, GA and a resident of San Francisco, CA during the early years of his career, moved to New Orleans in 1991 and, since establishing his New Orleans photo studio, he has become one of the leading art photographers in the city. Prior to his arrival in New Orleans, he had already contracted with Chronicle Books to create a book centering on an ambitious photo essay interpreting a city that many famous artists and writers had left their mark on well before him.
Randolph Delehanty agreed to collaborate on the project, writing an introduction and extended captions to Sexton’s photographs. Neither author had any substantial experience or expertise regarding New Orleans prior to this undertaking.
The book, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence, published in 1993, met with universal acclaim. Parallel Utopias, his most thematically ambitious project, followed. Using two planned postwar communities—Sea Ranch in northern California and Seaside in Florida—as positive examples, he developed an overarching critique of the American postwar built environment.
Next came Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road, published in the fall of 1999 as a companion to Elegance and Decadence. Subsequent books have included Gardens of New Orleans: Exquisite Excess with Lake Douglas, Rosemary Beach, and The Highway of Temptation Redemption: A Gothic Travelogue in Two Dimensions, Terra Incognito: America’s Third Coast, New Roads and Old Rivers: Louisiana’s historic Pointe Coupee Parish, and his latest, a Fall, 2014 release from the Historic New Orleans Collection, Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean Sphere.