by D. Eric Bookhardt via bestofneworleans.com

More than any other medium, photography is about time and time’s relationship to light and circumstance. In the hands of three Southern photographers, the results are often poetic. Deborah Luster’s early works, on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, predate her more famous images of Louisiana prisoners and crime scenes, but the same insightful whimsy illuminates views that include rural children posed with captive eels or dressed in their Sunday best amid fields of billowy cotton. Here the street corner magic tricks of characters like Damien and Listine, pictured, coexist with a colorful array of personalities who appear as living and breathing stories rendered in flesh — memories flash frozen in time.

The inhabitants of Shelby Lee Adams’ controversial Salt & Truth series of portraits from rural Appalachia are shocking for their unvarnished candor. Here highly eccentric characters gaze intently at us from within crumbling clapboard shacks or decrepit barns with raccoon skins nailed to plank walls. Much of this suggests a Diane Arbus version of WPA photography, but Adams, a native of the area, understands that while his subjects may lack sophistication, they radiate the enduring tenacity one might expect from living examples of unadulterated Appalachian Americana.

Legendary musician, author and historian Tav Falco has long been a dedicated photographer of his native turf, and his images taken in and around Memphis, Tenn., in the 1970s glow with the quiet lucidity of a vision that distills people and places to their salient inner essence. But this is the South, so all those ghostly landscapes and ramshackle structures seem inhabited by the spirits of all who have come before. Or as Falco puts it: “Photography is a lone process of the lone eye blinking and twitching and gazing upon the terrifying, amusing and often diverting evidence of the living and the dead.”

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Thru Dec. 22
Send it On Down: Photographs by Deborah Luster
Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St. (504) 522-1999

Thru Jan. 7
Salt & Truth: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams
50 Photographs: An Iconography of Chance: Photographs by Tav Falco
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., (504) 539-9600