Land Marks: For the love of books and photography

The VESTIGES Project is a collective of artists and writers based in New Orleans, a “vestigial burg” that, as one member puts it, has become “the biggest vestige-display territory” in the nation. But what’s a vestige, you ask? Don’t worry: I had to look it up, too.

Let’s ask the wise and almighty InterWeb:

ves?tige

-noun

1. a mark, trace, or visible evidence of something that is no longer

2. a surviving evidence or remainder of some condition, practice, etc

In the original Latin, vestige referred to a footprint. In biology, the term could be used to specifically describe the human tailbone, i.e. evolutionary features that are, for lack of a better word, obsolete. But in the context of Opal Gallery’s newest photography exhibition, you can think of it as the dwindling footprints of a city’s evolution, or, specifically, the evolution of New Orleans and what it means to live there both pre- and post-Katrina.