Richard Sexton circa 1958
RICHARD SEXTON
Born 1954 in Atlanta, Georgia
Studio based in New Orleans, Lousiana
Residences in Walton County, Florida and New Orleans, Louisiana
Richard Sexton began photographing while he was an undergraduate student at Emory University and is predominantly self-taught as a photographer. He was an early member of the Nexus Gallery in Atlanta, a cooperative photography gallery, which began in the 1970s and has since become a pillar of the Atlanta arts community. After he graduated from Emory in 1975, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977 and 1978.
In the late 1970s Sexton became disillusioned with his art school experience and decided to discontinue his pursuit of a graduate degree in photography. He began working as a darkroom technician in photographic labs. In 1980, with marginal prior experience, he began a commercial photographic career in San Francisco and chose to specialize in the photography of architecture-a subject that had always interested him. Over time, he came to work for some of the leading architecture/design firms in the Bay Area and his work was published in many local and national architecture and design magazines. One of his first major commissions was to photograph the "Presence of the Past" exhibit of the 1980 Venice Biennale which traveled to San Francisco in 1982. This was regarded as the seminal exhibit of postmodern architecture in the United States.
In 1984 Sexton developed the concept for a photographic book to consist of a diverse selection of noted American products that had become defining components of contemporary American popular culture. With the help of Thomas Ingalls, a prominent San Francisco-based book designer, he succeeded in selling this concept to Chronicle Books, a rapidly emerging San Francisco publisher noted for producing innovative, and frequently quirky, illustrated books. This book, Sexton's first, was titled American Style: Classic Product Design from Airstream to Zippo. Published in 1987, it began a relationship with Chronicle Books that continues to the present and expanded Sexton's career from that of a commercially successful architectural photographer, to an author, as well.
Book projects would become a mainstay of Sexton's career. In 1989, Chronicle published his second title, The Cottage Book, which documented the tradition of cottage living and design in the San Francisco Bay area. Two years later Sexton completed In the Victorian Style, in collaboration with architectural historian Randolph Delehanty. This title was devoted to the domestic Victorian architecture for which San Francisco is so well known.
In 1991, Sexton moved from San Francisco to New Orleans. Prior to his arrival in New Orleans, he had already contracted with Chronicle to create a book about his new place of residence. The concept centered 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, was met with broad acclaim. Susan Larson, the Times-Picayune's book reviewer, gave it her "best of the year" award and Dr. Patricia Brady, director of publications for The Historic New Orleans Collection, called it "the best photographic book ever done on the city." The Rounce and Coffin Club in Los Angeles bestowed an Award of Merit for its design. The public seemed to agree: "Elegance and Decadence" had six hardcover printings, and a revised edition was printed in 2003. It also inspired a television feature produced by Peggy Scott Laborde for the HGTV network.
Parallel Utopias: The Quest for Community, followed Elegance and Decadence in 1995. This title was a return to the methodology of Sexton's first two books in which he served as photographer and writer. Parallel Utopias is his most thematically ambitious project to date. 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.
In 1997 Sexton began work on a new book, Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana's River Road, published in the fall of 1999. This title, the companion volume to Elegance and Decadence, represents a culmination of the thematic organization and interpretive photo essay approach that proved successful in Elegance and Decadence. With a solid track record behind him, Sexton was given significant leeway with Vestiges of Grandeur-he served as photographer, writer, photo editor, and oversaw the book's design. This level of creative control is seldom granted to an author.
Sexton continues to work on book projects. In 2000, he created all the contemporary photographs for Gardens of New Orleans: Exquisite Excess authored by Lake Douglas, formerly of the Arts Council of New Orleans, and Jeannette Hardy, the former Times-Picayune garden editor; published by Chronicle Books, Spring 2001. In the fall of 2004, Chronicle Books published a postcard book of Sexton's photographs entitled "New Orleans and the River Road." In the spring of 2007 Sexton's latest book Rosemary Beach is being published by Pelican Publishing. This book is based on an extensive photo essay of Rosemary Beach, Florida, a significant and influential New Urbanism community.
In 2004, Sexton self-published an art project that he had worked on for over a decade, The Highway of Temptation and Redemption: A Gothic Travelogue in Two Dimensions. This project consisted of austere photographs of road signs taken over several years along the back roads between the Florida panhandle and southwest Georgia. The photographs were complemented by a written travelogue that formed a choppy, but continuous narrative. The work was presented as a fine art handmade book, which was excerpted in Louisiana Cultural Vistas, and which was the basis for Sexton's first major museum exhibit at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. This exhibition ran from April to August 2005.
During a similar timeframe, from the early 1990s to the present, Richard Sexton created black and white landscape photographs of the gulf coast, from the Mississippi River to the Florida panhandle. In the fall of 2005, Chronicle Books offered to publish a fine art photography book based on this series of work. The book, Terra Incognita: Photographs of America's Third Coast, will be published in September 2007. This will be Sexton's eighth title with Chronicle Books, but it's the first title where his photographs will be published for their own sake featured in a fine art title. A traveling exhibit will open at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art concurrent with the book's release in October 2007.
Gallery exhibition and collection of Sexton's photographs are an outgrowth of his book projects, commissions as an architectural photographer, and personal, or self-assigned, projects. Like many media photographers before him, his recognition and achievements on the printed page have spawned an alternate career as an artist and have been the impetus for speaking engagements in the arts community. Sexton teaches photography at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, a private art school and previously taught photography at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. He lectures frequently at events such as the Planning Conference of the American Institute of Architects (1996) and the National Design Conference of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (1997). In 1997, Sexton curated the exhibit "Sidney Bechet: A World of Jazz 1897-1997" for the Bechet Centennial Committee, which commemorated the centennial of the highly-influential jazzman's birth-an event celebrated in both France and the United States.
With over 200,000 books in print and publication in magazines and newspapers throughout the United States and Europe, Richard Sexton has become noted as a photographer, artist, writer, critic, teacher, and author.
