Eric Waters Photography Class

Meeting every Wednesday and Saturday from 10 -11:15am, this photography course will help hone your photography skills with interactive classes, fieldtrips to Vieux Carre, and peer critiques with the culminating activity of a photo exhibition. This class will also feature professional photographers as guests towards the end of the series.

Sessions will include basic photography fundamentals including, getting to know your camera, composition, and comprehension, as well as the fundamentals of film photography and digital photography.

Fee- $300.00 per person (covers all classes)

Class size - 20 participants

Participants will need to provide their own cameras.

Eric Waters Bio:

Eric Waters has been a professional photographer for more than 30 years. He studied under the tutelage of the late Marion Porter, a well-known and respected Black New Orleans photographer and owner of Porter’s Photo News. Waters decided early on in his career that New Orleans street culture had significant historical value and was worthy of documentation. Although he is sought after as an event and wedding photographer, he is best known for capturing the vibrant and energetic scenes of the Second Line and the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. He is one of few photographers with the “insider’s view” of what makes this culture come alive.

Waters’s work has appeared on CD covers for jazz artists such as Bob French, Victor Goins, Juanita Brooks, Dr. Michael White, and Smokey Johnson. His work has also appeared in local and national magazines, newspapers, brochures, and show bills. He was the lead photographer for projects like Ties That Bind, an exhibit and catalog sponsored by the Casey Foundation, and Great Day in New Orleans, a group photo capturing 283 New Orleans African-American artists of all genres.

In 1985, he founded Ebonimages, a non-profit organization, to catalog and exhibit the collection of Marion Porter. The organization is dedicated to documenting African-American culture in New Orleans, especially jazz musicians, Black Mardi Gras Indians, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Second Line parades, jazz funerals, and other social events. He is a co-organizer of Seeing Black, a multimedia, research-based project chronicling and celebrating the history, influence, performance aesthetic, and futurity of Black photography in New Orleans.

He was a 2019 Joan Mitchell Center Resident and has work in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans African American Museum, Clark Atlanta University, and numerous private collections.

Host or Publisher New Orleans Jazz Museum