Rick Olivier has been photographing the music and culture of New Orleans and South Louisiana since his high school days in the 1970’s. A native of White Castle, Louisiana, his earliest professional achievement was winning two Louisiana Press Association awards for Feature Photography at the age of 16. He moved to New Orleans in 1982 and established himself as an acute observer of the local music scene with photography and writing for Wavelength Magazine, using the nom de plume “rico”. By 1985 he had branched out into album covers, corporate annuals, advertising, and editorial assignments for national and regional magazines, which he continues to accept.
Olivier’s book, “Zydeco!” (University of Mississippi Press, 1999) won the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book Of The Year Award and stands as the definitive pictorial record of Louisiana’s exciting Creole dance music scene.
His music photographs have appeared on more than one hundred LP and CD covers and his portraits have twice graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Rick Olivier owns and operates Rick Olivier Photography / City Park Studio out of a former corner grocery store converted into a 1500 square foot studio in Mid-City New Orleans. His music can be heard in the Creole String Beans, a band known for their dedication to golden-era New Orleans r&b and South Louisiana swamp pop.
Communication Arts Photography Annual 41
Book Review of Zydeco!
By Anne Telford 
New Orleans photographer Rick Olivier has produced a stunning book documenting the rarified world of zydeco. A Creole Louisiana music form dominated by the accordion and frottoir or rubboard (originally, literally a washboard, often played with a handful of bottle openers, the first frottoir was invented by Clifton and Cleveland Chenier and made to order at a Lafayette sheet metal shop), zydeco is as much a part of the state as gumbo, crawfish, and Mardi Gras. Popularized by Clifton Chenier, the proclaimed “King Of Zydeco” and later groups such as Queen Ida, Buckwehat Zydeco and Rockin’ Dopsie, the music is a powerful unifying force in the Black, Cajun and Creole communities.
In 80 black-and-white photographs, Olivier has captured a part of American life that has rarely been seen in this intimate a fashion. Ben Sandmel’s text is scholarly in its research and scope, but genuine in tone, presenting the performers and their audience in a true light. As cartoonist Lynda Barry writes in the book notes, “Their integrity, knowledge, respect for people, and love of music are evident on every page.” Having lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, and known many of the people Olivier documented for this loving tribute, I can testify that it’s a real as a boat trip through the Atchafalaya.
Designed by Todd Lape, the book’s clean design, with text set in Avenir, enhances its readability. Olivier’s photographs, such as “Gerard Delafose sitting in with John Delafose and the Eunice Playboys”, showing a little boy with his tiny guitar joyfully mimicking his father behind him, capture beautifully the unrestraine3d joy that this music brings to its performers and listeners. A Bibliography, as well as Recommended Listening, Films, and Videos, Live Performances in Louisiana, and Song Credits, neatly round out the book and offer many suggestions for further exploration.
Zydeco! is a sterling example of a photographer finding a topic of interest and paying his dues to document it properly. The scenes of rural Louisiana life, the joy and passion engendered by this life-affirming music an the pride that shows in the faces of these hardworking men and women, is a testament to Olivier’s skill as a photographer, and the trust shared by his subjects. This is a genuine book about a very genuine subject. In the often-glitzy world of photography, it is rare to find such a gem.
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HOT TO TROT
By Paul Trynka
Mojo Magazine, April 1999 
Out in western Louisiana the cowboys look a little different. They dance to zydeco and Cajun music at clubs like Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki in Opelousas or El Sid O’s in Lafayette. Boozoo Chavis had a huge regional hit with the pioneering zydeco song Paper In My Shoe in 1954 but, disenchanted with the pittance he received in royalties, quit to earn a living training racehorses. When Rick Olivier went out to Dog Hill, Louisiana to photograph him, Boozoo – after rustling up a mean creole lunch – instructed son Poncho to saddle his favourite steed, then galloped ’round the Chavis corral.
Chavis was one of countless Louisiana characters tracked down by Olivier and writer Ben Sandmel for their forthcoming book, Zydeco! (University of Mississippi Press, $45 hardback). The book depicts a vibrant culture in rude health, as demonstrated by the cover image of Chris Ardoin, latest scion of a musical family whose zydeco roots stretch back half a century: “A young kid, wearing Tommy Hilfiger and a pager,” Olivier points out, “and he plays accordion for a living!”
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ZYDECO PICKS UP THE BEAT
By Craig Havighurst
The Wall Street Journal, April 19, 1999
Later this month, almost 500,000 people will converge on New Orleans for the 39th annual Jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest), and thousands more will swarm across southwestern Louisiana this summer for the many festivals that make up Francofête, the 300th anniversary of t French influence in the Bayou State. Jazz Fest showcases a wider, deeper lineup of essential American musical styles than any festival in the nation, running through the cream of jazz, rhythm and blues, country, soul, gospel, blues, and then some. But the sound that will churn up the most dust in the Fair Grounds Race Course infield and in the prairie land parishes is zydeco.
…Zydeco dancing, a sweaty, sensual riot, has been a low-key craze fro several years in cities like Washington, D.C., Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Francisco and Birmingham, Alabama. But the music acquired a new kind of heft recently with the publication of two exceptional books. The Kingdom of Zydeco (Arcade) by New Orleans journalist Michael Tisserand marks the first comprehensive history of the music and a delightful geography of a people and place as untouched by Wal-Mart homogeneity as any in the nation. And Zydeco! (University of Mississippi Press) is a stunning volume of black-and-white photography by Rick Olivier with commentary by Ben Sandmel.
Mr. Tisserand traces the complicated politics of Creole/Cajun identity; the tragic story of Amede’ Ardoin, the first and perhaps the finest Creole accordionist to make a record, and the development of today’s funky zydeco, which in Louisiana is no anachronism but the hip party sound of young African-Americans. Mr. Sandmel, with a documentarian’s economy, relates the same story through the eyes of some of the music’s important innovators. And Mr. Olivier’s photographs take us to the Louisiana countryside and inside the dance halls, brilliantly juxtaposing the blur of the zydeco frenzy with the rich textures of boot-polished plywood, corrugated metal and sweaty black skin.
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ZYDECO PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MUSIC TO THE EYES
By Chris Waddington
Times-Picayune Lagniappe, April 26, 1999
Freelance photographer Rick Olivier has worked for Newsweek and Rolling Stone, Virgin Records and Sony Music, but part of him would rather be giving his photos away at Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki Lounge in Opelousas. Giving pictures to the musicians who play at such traditional zydeco venues opened doors for Olivier, whose documentary photographs capture the sweaty, good time spirit that reigns when wheezing accordions set the beat and the dance floors fill across rural Louisiana.
That zydeco spirit also reigns at the Gallery of Southern Photographers, 608 Julia St., where an exhibit of Olivier’s black and white prints continues through April. Olivier’s mix of 21 portraits, still lifes and action scenes distills a decade of work that began with a commercial assignment to shoot an album cover for Rounder Records.
“Like everybody else, I’d seen Clifton Chenier perform, and even took a picture of him when I worked for the Plaquemine newspaper in high school, but I didn’t realize how beautiful the whole scene was until I walked into Richard’s Club in 1986,” Olivier said. “I suppose I could chide myself for having missed something in my own backyard, but it’s not quite my backyard. These clubs aren’t places a lot of white folks ever enter.”
Olivier, 38, may have looked like an outsider when he first appeared at the clubs, but over the years has become a fixture, taking pictures of such noted performers as Delton Broussard and Boozoo Chavis.
“I’m recognized by performers,” Olivier said. “They know I’m not off the plane from New York or L.A. for a two-day shoot. The whole project has been a labor of love. It doesn’t put food on my table.”
Instead, Olivier’s rewards have come in the form of praise.
“Most pictures of musicians are dreadfully silent. They seem to need a soundtrack for full effect,” said Steven Maklansky, Curator of Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art. “But Olivier get the music into the image, giving you a sense of a performer’s working environment and craft.”
Olivier’s works stand out from most pictures because he treats silver-based photography as a slow process, not a convenient way to snatch images in an eyeblink. He spends up to two hours hand printing each piece, pulling details out of the shadows and toning back highlights to create compositions that mirror the spirit of a given moment. In the rough and tumble of the clubs, he’ll sometimes spend a whole evening without picking up his camera, counting on his instincts to tell him when to begin.
“To get a sense of sound and movement into a picture is a dilemma for any photographer,” Olivier said. “A photograph has to crystallize the essence of a moment, it’s a way to get at the poetry, not the prose, of a situation. A really successful photographer can feel proud if he takes 50 poetic images in the course of 50 years.”
Olivier’s dedication to craft is mirrored in the work of his subjects, many of whom build the instruments that they play. The show contains a beautiful still life of violins-in-progress, their shapely parts spread on the bed of Cajun fiddler and fiddle builder Lionel Leleux.
“I identify with people like Lionel,” Olivier said, “I’m from a Cajun background myself, so I’m familiar with that rural idea that you ought to be able to build or fix all of your own tools – from tractors to accordions. I try to bring that same idea to my pictures.”
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ZYDECO! HONORED AS HUMANITIES BOOK OF THE YEAR
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
New Orleans (3/20/00) – The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state organ for the National Endowment for the Humanities, has recognized outstanding work in the humanities since 1985. According to Michael Sartisky, president and executive director of the LEH, a wide range of nominations in each field are meticulously studied before the winners are named.
The LEH will be acknowledging Zydeco! Photographs by Rick Olivier and Text by Ben Sandmel, as a 2000 Humanities Book of the Year. Fortune and Misery: Sallie Rhett Roman of New Orleans: A Biographical Portrait and Selected Fiction (1891-1920), by Dr. Nancy Dixon, will also be honored in that category. In addition to the Humanities Book of the Year awards, the following will also be given: one Humanist of the Year award; five Special Humanities awards; tow Chair’s Awards for institutional support; one Award for Lifetime Contribution; and three Humanities Teacher of the Year awards.
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OLIVIER CAPTURES THE CHARACTERS OF ZYDECO
By Doug MacCash
Lagniappe Magazine, Times-Picayune, May, 2000
Good documentary photographers are tightrope walkers. They try to capture the genuine appearance of their subjects. But if they lean too far toward objectivity, they risk producing prosaic shots that don’t attract the eye of onlookers. If they tilt too far in the other direction, they can fall into taking self-indulgent art shots that obscure the subject they seek to document.
With his black and white photos of zydeco musicians, at Bassetti Gallery through May 14, Rick Olivier manages to stay on the high wire practically all the time. Olivier’s 11-year photographic project took him to the prairie of west-central Louisiana where zydeco, a kissin’-cousin of Cajun music, was born and thrives. Zydeco and Cajun share roots in the traditional French music that came to Louisiana in the 18th century with Acadian refugees. Cajun is a synthesis of that ancestral dance music with country and western. Zydeco, on the other hand, blended old tunes with the earliest rhythm and blues. Basically, Cajun music is played by white people; zydeco by black people.
The term zydeco is a corruption of the French word for snap beans. In an early zydeco song, the lyrics refer to eating snap beans without so much as salt for flavoring–and eloquent indication of the rural poverty from which the music was born. The conditions may not be quite so grinding as in the sharecropping days of early zydeco, but Olivier’s photos certainly demonstrate that the music still arises from a no-frills environment.
Olivier used a variety of techniques over the years to produce the 20-plus large prints in this exhibit. The least interesting of the photos are the few staged shots that seem concerned with the subjects alone. The photo of Lawrence and Chris Ardoin, for instance, posed against a mottled portraitist’s backdrop, is a conservative publicity shot, bereft of artistic merit. But Olivier only rarely exhibits such lack of vision.
Olivier uses time exposure to record some of the motion that is so much a part of zydeco. Time exposures are made when a photographer allows the shutter of the camera to remain open long enough that the subjects of the shot move, causing ghost-like multiple images on the film. In pieces such as “Cowboys Watch Dancers at Richard’s Club,” the technique works well because of the contrast between the dark solidity of the motionless foreground figures, and the hazy, ephemeral appearance of the gyrating dancers. In another good piece titled “Mark Williams, Fire Frottoir,” the bobbing musician’s glittering washboard blurs into a flame-like pattern that is a symbol of the hot, frenetic music itself. But the technique fails in “Boozoo Chavis on Horseback,” because the image of a mounted cowboy slurred with motion is just too familiar a conceit.
The best pieces in the show were produced when Olivier used a combination of natural light and an explosive strobe to illuminate the foreground. Another photo of Chavis on horseback, this time while playing the accordion, is one of the finest in the show. The front-and-center composition is not terribly interesting, but the starkness of the fill light causes the scene to become unnaturally flat as though the whole episode were pressed under glass. Only the subtle shadows receding from the horse’s legs add volume. This odd flatness gives the image a hard-to-define weirdness that is magnetic.
The same strangeness permeates the photo titled “Chris Ardoin at Spanish Lake”. Here the bright foreground flash causes a sharpness of detail in the front of the piece that is the complete opposite of the soft, cypress silhouettes in the dusk light of the background. Ardoin becomes a glowing zydeco genie emerging magically into the wetland twilight.
If Ardoin is an accordion-playing genie, the Olivier’s low-angle camera causes Dieudonne “Double D” Dauphine to become a menacing dance hall giant. The photo of Dauphine at the Dauphine Cub in Parks is the best image in the show, and again it is Olivier’s extreme fill light that carries the day. Here, the blast of light has splashed Dauphine’s shadow onto the ceiling above him, increasing his height and sinister aura.
The photos in this exhibit, along with several others, appear in the new book titled “Zydeco! Photographs by Rick Olivier, Text by Ben Sandmel.”
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Letter from John Szarkowski
The Museum of Modern Art
April 23, 1999
Dear Rick Olivier:
I liked your pictures, when they finally got to me. The delay was not the fault of the Museum, but my own; I had told them I would come by to pick up my mail, and I did not.
It is by now surely too late for me to do a jacket blurb. If I am wrong about that you can tell the U. Press of Miss. that they could say this:
“I have not heard these musicians, but if they play as well as they look in Rick Olivier’s pictures, it would be worth a trip.”
John Szarkowski
Director Emeritus, Department of Photography
The Museum of Modern Art
With best wishes for the success of your book,
Sincerely,
John Szarkowski
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FEST FOCUS: RICK OLIVIER
Offbeat Magazine, May 2004
Redacted by Bunny Matthews
I was born August 19, 1957, in White Castle, Louisiana, which is about 50 miles north of New Orleans, on the other side of the river. I lived there until I was 17.
Both of my parents were Cajuns–they spoke French when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying. They never taught us French.
My mom was friends with a lady named Honey Babin, who was a schoolteacher when the CODOFIL (promoting the teaching of French in Louisiana schools) thing happened in academic circles. It didn’t seep down to the regular folks until maybe ten years later. They (my parents) carried around the stigma of being punished in school for speaking French. It wasn’t something my parents had a lot of pride about. Although they were never ashamed of their roots, they never bragged about being Cajun. The Cajun Pride thing is a fairly recent development and is mostly an effort to sell food. Zydeco is now used to sell toothpaste…and you-name-it.
I started taking photographs in high school, when I was 15, in 1971. I bought a 35-millimeter camera, set up a little darkroom in the utility room. I just knew it was going to be a fun way to make a living, better than delivering papers, working in a lumberyard or an oilfield. Those jobs were not fun. Plus, the girls liked it.
In high school I listened to the James Gang, Slade, KISS. A real small percentage of today’s Cajun teenagers listen to zydeco–most of the kids are listening to Manny Fresh. They’re not listening to the folk music. You can’t really be into something until you’re ready to be into it, you know what I mean? In college I had to get past George Thorogood to get to Muddy Waters.
When you’re in high school, a teenager, and you get good at something, that becomes part of your identity. I always had the camera. In fact, I skipped my junior year of football to shoot pictures of the games. All my uncles told me I was absolutely crazy to do that–I would never have the chance to play football again. That’s how much I was into photography. Football was a big deal at my little school.
Then I went off to college–”Harvard On The Bayou” in Thibodaux: Nicholls State. I majored in art because you couldn’t major in photography then. It was this typical art-consciousness…mid 70′s…still vestiges of the 60′s hippie mentality, a real hippie faculty. A little kid coming from a macho small town in Louisiana gets to just a little bit bigger town, but is exposed to this whole wide world of art history, technique, printmaking, painting, sculpture, blah-blah-blah. I always continued to do photography but I pretty much had to teach myself the photographic stuff in college because we never had a faculty photography teacher. It was always the ceramics guy or the sculpture guy, which was good because I always did teach myself anyway. I learned just as much teaching myself.
But in retrospect, looking back on it, it was so insulated from the world at large. Had I gone to L.S.U. and gotten into the photojournalism program I would have become a newspaper photographer, traveling the world–that would have been my thing. Whereas, in this little Cajun town, it became much more of a singular artist’s mentality that I developed, which I’m not saying is better or worse. I think the vision that I put into my photography is probably more influenced by painting and art history than a photojournalism program would have produced. There is photojournalism in there for sure–you can’t get away from it if you’re taking photographs–but I think my work is more influenced by a solitary artist’s mentality. Look (pointing to his studio)–it’s me and the dog…for 20 years! That’s the way I work. There’s not a lot of other people so when I go out and photograph these things, I really feel like, “How can I make a picture that, 1) people haven’t made before, and, 2) what about me is going to make that happen?” I don’t want to make the pictures that just anybody could make.
The way I was raised, in the French culture–it’s very warm…a lot of feeling for people…the French bloodline…overly passionate, overly emotional, but you feel connected with people…when I photograph people I really feel that. That is really where I’m coming from: connecting with all these people and allowing them to give me something. I’m not standing in the way too much. Like, when you write, you kind of get out of the way–that’s how I am with the camera. I’m letting them pour something into it.
A lot of times what they pour in is just fantastic.
I think I always knew Louisiana culture was unique, innately, some sort of way. The real epiphany was the first time I walked into Richard’s Club in Lawtell to do my first zydeco album cover. Rounder did this two-album set–Live From Richard’s. Man, when I walked into that place, which had been right under my nose–I had driven by it before in years past…but the racially segregated nature of South Louisiana meant that I never had bothered to go in that place. In fact, I never even thought of going in there, which is kind of weird.
But now I had a reason to go in there–to make pictures–and I was like a kid in a candy store. It was so beautiful–the people were so amazing. The music, the visuals, everything. That was a real epiphany for me when I realized that there’s nothing like this–even close to this–anywhere else. I also knew from that moment on, I was going to do whatever I had to do to turn that into a book. It just felt like a book from jump (snaps fingers).
I psychoanalyze myself in retrospect and see that guys like Boozoo Chavis represented my dad in a lot of ways: the same type of character, real tough, came up in deprivations we can’t even imagine. That era hardened them in a way. But you always felt that if they liked you, they’d give you the shirt off their back. There’s nothing they wouldn’t do for you. It was a combination of real tough, but real generous at the same time. For me–my dad died when I was 20, my parents were 43 when I was born–most of my adult life my dad wasn’t around. I know it sounds kind of Freudian, but I really came to love and appreciate guys like Boozoo so much because of issues about my dad. You really miss ‘em when they die, you really do. You start to look for other connections.
My dad was a big horseman, loved horses, kind of a cowboy in his own way. When you find similarities like that, you end up pursuing it (zydeco) for reasons beyond the surface reasons. I’m sure there was some racial stuff involved, being raised in a segregated culture and then being accepted by the Creole and black communities out there–really accepted and given free rein to do whatever pictures I wanted to do–that to me was such a fantastic thing that I wanted to do a project like this book to try and show how cool these people are.
Quintron: That was one of the best day’s assignments ever. In the afternoon, we drove around in the back of a pick up truck and Quintron was doing his “drive-by”, where they hook the amplifier up to the truck’s battery and they blast out. It’s loud as hell! They drive around all over town with these crazy people in costumes in the back of the truck. Then we went over to Michael Pelias’ and we all got in the swimming pool. That was so much fun!
Alex Chilton: Alex needed a promo shot for a concert in Canada. This is Alex at home in Treme’–it’s a beautiful old house. The wallpaper is just really fantastic and I always wanted to do a portrait of him in front of it. The print is cross processed so there’s this kind of weird look to the colors. It’s because the color film is developed in the wrong developer.
Earl King: This photograph was taken at the Tastee Donuts at the corner of Prytania and Louisiana Avenue. Earl used to hang out there all the time. He was hard to find, but it was well known that Tastee was his hang-out. He wrote a bunch of his songs there.
Huey “Piano” Smith: This is Huey Smith and his granddaughter at home in Baton Rouge, about 1983. Me and Toby Lewis, who used to own Tupelo’s Tavern (previously known as Jed’s), we drove up there and Huey came and greeted us, cracked open a bottle of cold duck and started showing us videos of him around the house. He was a funny guy–it wasn’t just an act. He was for-real funny the whole time we were there.
Lionel Leleux: He’s from Leleux, Louisiana, west of Lafayette. It addition to being a really great fiddler, he was also a fiddle repairman. All over his house were these cigar boxes of fiddle parts by the hundreds. He lived out there on this country road and everybody brought their fiddles to him to have them repaired. Marc Savoy hooked me up with Lionel.
Eddie Bo: That was for an album cover for a German label. We rented the grand piano. That was the second attempt, actually. The first attempt the guys were too late delivering the piano and Eddie had to go and the light was going so I made them bring the piano back the next day. It was $300 bucks for the piano but the record label sprung for it.
Mannie Fresh: To get through the gates at Eastover (subdivision) you have to have a reason for being there. A hip hop magazine hired me to shoot Mannie and all his fantastic cars. At the Cash Money house in Eastover they have a bunch of cars: Baby’s Bentley, Dodge PT Cruiser gangsta-cars, the Hot Boys stretch Excursion limo, L’il Wayne’s completely pimped-out Jaguar, these little four-wheel ATV’s with Dayton wire spoke wheels, all kinds of toys–it’s crazy. Every time I went out there, it was about 150 degrees and I had to sit in my car while they got ready for me to shoot the pictures. I don’t think they were trying to be rude, but you did have to wait. It was kind of like going to see the king, you don’t just walk in.
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A CELEBRATION OF MUSIC
By Sarah Spell
Times of Acadiana, 3/1/2000
Several excellent books have widened the path carved by the duo of artist and folklorist, including John Broven’s South to Louisiana, Ann Allen Savoy’s Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, and the works of Michael Tisserand.
Ben Sandmel’s Zydeco!, illustrated with the stunning photography of Rick Olivier, is a welcome addition to the pack. But getting there wasn’t easy, says Sandmel.
The book seemed a natural outgrowth of shared work between the journalist/musician and photographer/musician. “Rick and I found ourselves working on a lot of projects together,” says Sandmel. The two were collaborating on liner notes and feature articles about the music of southwest Louisiana for publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. “We found ourselves moving in the same circles.”
“By the late ’80′s, I started to realize that I was compiling a good bit of material,”
Sandmel says. But interesting a publisher was another matter. “We were turned down a number of times…photographic books are expensive to produce and, let’s face it, zydeco is not exactly a mainstream topic.”
Eventually, the University Press of Mississippi picked up the project.
We’re so glad they did. Olivier’s live-action images leap from the pages with the intensity of a Saturday night jam, while his portraiture leaves you wanting more.
Sandmel is a Grammy-nominated producer and a 12-year drummer for the Hackberry Ramblers. The Nashville native is careful and respectful in attempting to capture the nuances of regional culture. “I’m not from Louisiana,” he says, “but I’ve been here for 17 years. I didn’t just drop in for the weekend.” The author lends an informative and insightful background, while letting the artists speak for themselves.
Cajun and Creole Music Makers and Zydeco! are the sorts of books that seem ill-suited to gathering dust on a bookshelf. And they’re not coffee table fodder either. These are books to be read and re-read, revisited and cherished. Their combined pages make a joyful noise.
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UNCOMMON BEAUTY
By Becca Horne
Current Arts Weekly, April 2007
The photography of Rick Olivier illustrates more than his subjects
White Castle, Louisiana, native Rick Olivier has shot many world-famous zydeco musicians. Two of them, Leon Chavis and Geno Delafose, will be among the headliners at Daphne’s Fourth Annual Zydeco Festival, May 18 and 10, at the Daphne Civic Center. Chavis and Delafose were immortalized by Olivier in his book, simply entitled, Zydeco!
As a commercial artist, Olivier has photographed such well known celebrities as New Orleans author Anne Rice (for a New York Times Magazine cover) and Emeril Lagasse, to name a few.
Olivier was kind enough to “sit a spell” and share some of his thoughts on art and life, and their beautiful co-existence.
CURRENT: What drew you to the New Orleans area?
RICK OLIVIER: After graduating from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, LA, aka “Harvard On The Bayou”, I knew I didn’t want to pursue the “weddings and babies” photo-route, although I respect very much those who can do that really well. And I got a couple of pictures in a small New Orleans music magazine called Wavelength. A friend had an apartment coming available in a two-hundred-year-old Garden District building and I took it. Many of my ancestors probably lived in New Orleans and it seems to be in my blood, for better or for worse! I love/hate the laid back lifestyle here but I wish the city functioned better on many levels. Culturally, it’s still probably the greatest American city, even post-Katrina.
CURRENT: What was the first photo you ever sold?
RICK OLIVIER: Not sure about “sold” since print sales are a very small fraction of my income. I make my living licensing reproduction rights to the commercial images I create. But the first image I had reproduced was for a local newspaper around 1972, the Greater Plaquemine Post. It was black-and-white coverage of a softball tournament. The first photo I ever made that I really considered a “work of art” was of a cobbler (shoe repairman) named Mr. Agosta, in White Castle, around 1974.
CURRENT: Favorite work you’ve done?
RICK OLIVIER: I’m most proud of the Zydeco! Project. I think ordinary people are heroes in their own way I hope these photographs show that idea.
CURRENT: What inspires you?
RICK OLIVIER: Uncommon manifestations of beauty, by which I mean that beauty might be found in something not commonly considered “beautiful”. The dancers featured in Zydeco! would be an example of that. Not sure why that inspires me. I don’t think about it too much.
CURRENT: Tell us about the art community in New Orleans, post-Katrina.
RICK OLIVIER: I don’t know much about the art community. Because my commercial practice keeps me so busy, I don’t pursue exhibits or “art” stuff much. Galleries often have no idea how to market cultural and documentary photo works anyway. The gallery or collector usually likes to have artists in a bag they can wrap their minds around and I’ve found that if you work commercially, they often think you’re not a real “artist”. Irving Penn, Elliot Erwitt, Gilles Peress, Mary Ellen Mark, Josef Koudelka…the world’s greatest photographers have ALWAYS worked commercially! But it takes a collector or gallery with real vision to see that, no pun intended. I’d like to exhibit more and I hope to somehow carve some time out of my very busy schedule to pursue that. I’m not a good person to ask about the art community here. I wish it the best, bottom-line.
CURRENT: What are your current projects?
RICK OLIVIER: I’m gearing up for a booth at Jazz Fest this year, in addition to the usual mix of advertising, editorial, political campaigns and CD covers. Speaking of which, Irma Thomas’ Grammy-winning CD cover was shot right here, in this studio. My main project is raising my daughter to be a good and happy person, though.
CURRENT: Favorite piece of art?
RICK OLIVIER: Hmmm…too many to list I think, but Irving Penn’s book of black-and-white portraits, Worlds In A Small Room, would be in the top five, no doubt.
CURRENT: Favorite music?
RICK OLIVIER: That changes on a weekly basis. This week it’s Lily Allen’s new CD (Alright, Still) and Chet Baker’s late 50′s stuff with vocals. Next week it’ll be some crazy Mixmaster Mike turntable madness or vintage Jamaican rock steady.
CURRENT: Where can our readers find your work?
RICK OLIVIER: www.rickolivier.com
CURRENT: What would you like them to take away after viewing your photographs?
RICK OLIVIER: A greater appreciation for the beauty of cultural diversity. More empathy for people unlike themselves. A more open heart. More compassion. All the stuff I work on feeling every day.
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THE GUMBO OF ZYDECO
By John Wirt
Morning Advocate Magazine, May 30, 1999
Writer & Photographer Capture 25 years of Spicy Music Experience
In lovingly assembled words and pictures, Ben Sandmel and Rick Olivier’s Zydeco! takes readers to the pulsating zydeco dance halls of southwest Louisiana.
Sandmel supplies historical context and interviews with zydeco stars past and present, Olivier provides evocative black and white portraits and scenes snapped over a period of 25 years. Zydeco! captures the spicy blend of music, language and culture that is zydeco.
Unlike so many itinerant writers and film crews that have documented south Louisiana, Sandmel and Olivier invested years of time and travel into their zydeco document.
“It’s not like we just blew in on the plane and shot for two days and went home,” Olivier said from his home in New Orleans. “It’s really a long-term thing. I think they (the musicians) appreciate that.”
Olivier began photographing zydeco musicians while still a high school student in White Castle. It was then that he de3veloped the black and white approach he still uses today. Zydeco!’s often action-packed images have a timeless quality, the photographer said, something he could not have achieved using color film.
“I was instinctually driven to pursue the thing,” Olivier said.
“You never know what’s gonna become important further down the road. If you’re into documentation, you have to document now and hope for the best.”
Sandmel moved to New Orleans in 1982 from Chicago, where he’d been a writer for downbeat and gotten paid $50 and a set of snow tires to write notes for a recording by the late king of zydeco, Clifton Chenier.
Sandmel and Olivier spent years discussing a book project about zydeco music, a vibrant gumbo of blues, rhythm and blues, and Cajun music traditionally played by black Creoles of south Louisiana.
“There’s just such great material there, both photographically and culturally,” Sandmel said. “And we’re both fascinated with the music, and we enjoy going to the environment, going out to the scene there to gather the material.”
Olivier got serious about zydeco documentation in 1988 following an assignment to shoot photos for a Rounder Records album recorded at Richard’s Club in Lawtell.
“The people, the culture, the language, the cowboys, just everything about it blew me away,” Olivier said. “I knew from that point on that I was going to seriously pursue documenting this culture, whether it turned into a book or not. It’s like you have a gut feeling: ‘This is for me, right here’”
Olivier’s zydeco conversion has included his learning tricky zydeco dance steps.
“It took me three or four years to learn that step that they do, so I’m not letting go now,” he said.
“When you hear that scrubboard start scratching away, and the accordion starts pumping and these big James Brown rhythm sections start blasting, everybody starts dancing and suddenly the floor is bouncing up and down. It’s a cultural phenomenon,” Olivier added.
If you combine African music and culture and rhythms with that plaintive quality that Cajun music has, you gotta come up with something that’s really amazing. It’s the combination of the two cultures that gives it a lot of its power.”
The photographer also found zydeco musicians and fans to be wonderful subjects, personally as well as visually.
“They’re warm and generous people,” he said. “They’re country folks for the most part, and since all of my ancestors were country farmers and trappers, that was part of why I felt very much at home with them.”
Like Olivier, Sandmel – a writer and musician who plays drums for and manages the legendary Cajun band, The Hackberry Ramblers – is a zydeco devotee. His love of zydeco began in 1976 upon hearing Clifton Chenier’s Bogalusa Boogie album.
“It was a revelation to me that the accordion could be such a funky instrument,” Sandmel said.
Zydeco, the writer explained, “is vital happy music that makes you dance. Like Cajun music, you can appreciate zydeco in a cultural sense and yet at the same time you can know nothing about that and just the dynamism of the music alone, for many people, that’s all they need to know.”
Sandmel and Olivier’s Zydeco! follows the recent publication of Michael Tisserand’s The Kingdom Of Zydeco. The most obvious difference between the two is Zydeco!’s emphasis on photography. The Kingdom of Zydeco, text-oriented as it is, spends more time upon physical description.
Tisserand and Sandmel also don’t share the same favorite artists, Sandmel said. “We obviously covered a lot of the same ground, yet not identically, and we don’t have the same take on everything.”
Unlike the competitive musicians Sandmel and Tisserand write about, there’s no argument about who’s the king of zydeco books.
“His book works very well and ours works well and the two of them work together,” Sandmel said.
Sandmel also thanks Tisserand in the Zydeco! credits.
“He and I would often be on the phone at one o’clock in the morning asking zydeco nerd questions, who played on such and such. We kind of have a support group for two.”
Sandmel believes zydeco music, once an obscure regional music style, is now firmly established in the national consciousness.
“Its popularity is very high. Maybe not as trendy, sort of the culture flavor of the month, that it used to be, but there’s a lot of zydeco used in commercials for national ad campaigns and zydeco bands can make a living touring the world and there are a lot of opportunities for younger musicians to play zydeco. So zydeco is basically in healthy shape. The trendiness may wax and wane, but it will never go back to being an unknown local style.”
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TAKING COVERS
By Faith Dawson
New Orleans Magazine, January 2002
Sometimes circumstances create art. Just such a thing happened when local photographer Rick Olivier went to the Northshore to photograph a model for the cover of O Sister! The Women’s Bluegrass Collection, a CD from Rounder Records. Olivier tried to haul his camera with some particularly weighty equipment and the shutter snapped. The model happened to be in the frame, and though she was quite out of focus and not perfectly centered, golden clouds surrounded her in a majestic halo. Olivier lobbied for Rounder to use that as the cover, but the company chose another one and used the “mistake” as the back cover.
Accidents notwithstanding, cover shoots are “fairly well planned out beforehand,” Olivier says, “because this (CD) needs to illustrate the rest of the South, not south Louisiana, and the record company told me that. We can’t have cypress or live oaks with moss hanging because the music is not about that.”
Olivier dissects the front cover to show how staged it was: the model wears a dress and floppy straw hat that belong to Olivier’s wife and shoes purchased in a thrift store. Gal and guitar are loping through a flat, barren field that could be Tennessee or Georgia. The field actually lies north of Covington, a de facto suburb of New Orleans and, ironically, not a wellspring of bluegrass music.
It’s almost shallow to speculate about the subject of a painting or a photograph. (Take the Mona Lisa, for example. Millions of viewers have asked and will continue to ask into perpetuity, “Why is she smiling?”) But in the context of this CD, which includes several weepy but musically masterful who-wronged-who numbers, I couldn’t help but wonder if she were running away.
But back to circumstance. Consider the case of the late blues singer Johnny Adams, whose CD cover Olivier also shot. The CD is One Foot In The Blues, and the concept was to have Adams well-dressed but wearing one beat up work boot. Adams showed up for the shoot in an eye-popping Coke-can-red suit nattily accessorized with red shoes and socks. The photo suggests he rose from the ashes of some former life to glory, some higher plane where you don’t forget from whence you came.
It’s a wide-angle shot with kind of a 1960′s flavor in front of a brilliant backdrop, but Olivier says simply: “The suit is what makes the shot.” Of the backdrop, he adds, “Very clear, very plain. It allows the idea to really come through…but he just showed up with that suit.”
As a photographer, Olivier doesn’t rely on good luck, though he seems to have some on his side, but he is clever enough to recognize and opportunity for a great photograph, be it in a field, in someone’s architecturally correct kitchen or in a zydeco swinger’s palace in Cajun country. His 1999 book, Zydeco!, resulted from numerous trips to southwestern Louisiana, where he enjoyed photographing the musicians whom he loves, such as Boozoo Chavis.
An aside: Anytime you look at someone’s pictures, you also receive excruciating minutiae with every frame: “Here’s us at Mount Rushmore. Here’s us at Mount Rushmore again, but Rocky blinked. And here’s us by the…” Olivier doesn’t deliver a narrative as I leaf through his book and portfolios.
Girl-funk band Luscious Jackson is pictured with producer Daniel Lanois. They’re all posed like little leprechauns admiring each other, jigging around the former Kingsway Studio on Esplanade Avenue.
“What are they doing?” I ask.
“They’re dancing,” he says, a little surprised. The moment is so natural, this all-girl rock band and they’re sprightly mentor, that I’m caught off guard, thinking there must be more to the story.
Despite his music-heavy portfolio, Olivier says he doesn’t like to be pigeon-holed. He continues to do commercial and editorial work, like a gorgeous architectural spread in dwell magazine. Olivier uses plenty of lighting and captures angles like a little kid peeking out from behind a sofa, forcing viewers to see rooms from a new perspective.
But I particularly enjoy his portraits, which include plenty of well-known names, such as Emmylou Harris, Anne Rice, and the British rock band Bush. These are photographs that leave no question unanswered, telling me what I need to know about each person. I imagine portraiture to be an esoteric specialty of photography: From behind a lens, the photographer asks a person to pose–in or out of his natural habitat–and then he has to pry open that little window of the person, not the persona.
“The art of doing posed portraiture is really about connecting with that person,” Olivier says. “Most (subjects) want to connect on some level. My job, in a way, is not only to make a great picture, but to connect with them in a way that they allow me to make a great picture.”
Many artists say their dream subject or interview often hinges on a famous name. Olivier’s been there, done that, gotten the autograph. Turns out his dream–aside from the luxury of pursuing only art photography–is every man’s dream.
“If they call me with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, I probably would take that gig,” he says. “That would be a hoot. The fun factor would be enormous on that.”
Unfortunately, I have never wondered, why are those models frocking in the surf? Did anyone think to bring the sunscreen? But if any photographer can add subtext to the annual bikini fest, I’m sure Olivier can. And that’s no accident.