Meg Turner

Printmaker and photographer working out of New Orleans, Louisiana. Her practice spans prints, photography, and installation projects that respond to the landscape and the community she is part of.

In addition to her own work and contract printing, Meg serves as the master printer for local photogravure and wet collodion artist Josephine Sacabo. She founded the New Orleans Community Printshop and has since stepped back from a leadership position to focus on her studio practice.

She shoots primarily with a 4×5 Crown Graphic press camera, working in film and wet collodion.

A circular portrait embedded in a dramatic magenta-to-indigo gradient field, with deep black edges framing the composition

Interviewing Local Photographers in the French Quarter: A Field Guide

The French Quarter pulses with a kind of photographic energy that is hard to replicate anywhere else, and sitting down with the photographers who work those wrought-iron balconies and crumbling plaster walls can yield stories as layered as the patina on a century-old shutter. For Australian artists and writers who make the long-haul trek across the Pacific, the chance to capture those voices on the page feels like a rare privilege. The work that comes out of those conversations often becomes more than a profile; it turns into a record of a place that is shifting underfoot, one interview at a time.

Meg Turner has spent years documenting New Orleans through wet collodion plates and silver gelatin prints, and her approach to talking with fellow image-makers is rooted as much in listening as in looking. Her notes on the process, which she shares through her own site, treat the interview as a kind of darkroom ritual: slow, deliberate, and full of small revelations. For anyone planning a similar trip, the rhythm of preparation matters just as much as the moments when the recorder is finally running.

Preparing for the Conversation Before You Fly Out

A good interview begins long before you set foot on Royal Street. Spend time looking through the work of the photographers you hope to meet, not just their finished prints but the contact sheets, the rejected frames, and the studio detritus that shows how a body of work actually came together. Australians who have grown up around the visual shorthand of places like Hosier Lane or the Salamanca arts precinct tend to read images quickly, so push past the obvious frames and look for the quieter decisions a photographer made in the edit.

Make a list of questions, but treat that list as scaffolding rather than a script. The best conversations tend to wander sideways, picking up threads the subject did not expect to follow. Bring a notebook with pages left blank for tangents, and pencil rather than pen if you are the type who scribbles in the margins during long talks. The rhythm of handwriting also slows you down, which is useful when the person opposite you is still finding their way through an answer.

Finding the Right Subjects on the Ground

Cold approaches still work in the French Quarter, but they work best when you already have something to show. A small portfolio of your own work, a printed zine, or a few sample interview pages from a previous project gives a stranger a reason to give you ten minutes of their afternoon. Many photographers in the Quarter are used to being asked for portraits, so they tend to respond to anyone who comes with a genuine creative proposition rather than a quick selfie.

Look for the studios that keep odd hours, the ones tucked above bookshops on Chartres or behind unmarked doors off Esplanade Ridge. They are usually run by people who have been there long enough to have opinions about the flood of 2005 and the slow creep of short-term rentals. If you can, time your visits around the smaller art walks, the ones that pop up in courtyards rather than on the main strips. Australians used to navigating the fringe edges of events like the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney will recognise the value of slipping past the marquee names.

Setting Up the Recording Without Breaking the Mood

The Quarter has its own acoustic personality, a layering of street musicians, tour groups, and the occasional passing second line that can swallow a quiet voice if your gear is not up to scratch. A directional shotgun mic with a fluffy windscreen is worth the luggage space, especially if you plan to record outside. Inside, a small lavalier clipped to the subject's collar often captures warmth that a tabletop recorder misses, and it frees your hands to take notes or grab a frame.

Light behaves differently under those old ceilings, and any photographer interviewing fellow photographers will be tempted to start shooting before the conversation properly begins. Resist that pull for the first few minutes. Let the subject settle into their own rhythm, then ease into a portrait once the guard is down. Meg often recommends treating the shoot as a separate session that happens to share a room with the chat, and her guide to field sessions walks through how she keeps the two strands from tangling.

Asking Questions That Earn Better Answers

Closed questions get closed answers, and a simple "how long have you been shooting?" will only ever take you so far. Ask instead about a specific frame, a particular commission, or a tool that the photographer seems unusually attached to. The detail is what unlocks the story. Australians tend to be comfortable with a bit of bluntness, so do not be afraid to ask about money, about difficult clients, or about the work a photographer quietly wishes they had never taken.

Leave space for the awkward pauses. Some of the most honest lines arrive in the ten seconds after the obvious answer has ended, when the subject is deciding whether to keep going. If you can, hold the silence rather than rushing in with a follow-up. A printed list of prompts in your back pocket helps on the days when the conversation stalls, and a thermos of decent coffee does more for morale than most people would admit. The baristas in the Quarter know how to pull a flat white if you ask, even if they call it something else on the menu.

Capturing Portraits Alongside the Audio

A photograph taken during an interview carries a different weight than one staged afterwards. The subject's posture, the way they hold a cup, the small gestures they make when explaining a process, all of those details feed back into the portrait if you stay alert. Shoot in bursts, but keep the shutter quiet if you can. A silent shutter or a leaf shutter lens saves you from pulling the subject out of their train of thought every time you press the button.

Think about how the final image will sit next to the printed quotes. A tight head-and-shoulders frame works well for editorial layouts, while a wider environmental portrait gives the reader a sense of the studio or the street outside. Meg's wet plate portraits often lean into the second option, using the architecture of the Quarter as a kind of second subject. Mixing both approaches across a series keeps the reader visually interested without losing the thread of the conversation itself.

Editing, Consent, and What to Leave Out

Once you are back at your hotel or your rented apartment, transcribe the audio while the voice is still fresh in your ear. Software helps, but your own typing catches the small hesitations and the dropped consonants that give a speaker their character. Send the subject a draft of the quotes you plan to use, not the full transcript, and give them a realistic window to respond. Most photographers will appreciate the courtesy, and a few will catch the moment when you misheard "barrel" for "barren."

Be honest about what you cut. Long pauses, false starts, and the inevitable bathroom break where the recorder kept running should not make it into the final piece. If a subject asked you off the record, treat that as binding. The trust you build in those small decisions is what keeps the door open for the next interview, and the one after that.

Publishing and Sharing the Work

A finished interview piece lives or dies on where it sits. A plain text page with a single portrait can feel thin, especially after the work that went into the conversation. Pair the words with a small gallery, a short audio clip, and a clear credit line for the photographer's own work. If you print the piece, choose a paper stock that feels closer to a fine art book than a newspaper, the way Australian small-press publishers in the Fitzroy print scene often do.

Build a small archive of every interview you publish, even the ones that felt shaky at the time. Looking back over a year of conversations reveals patterns you could not have spotted in the moment, and it gives you material for a future zine, exhibition, or talk. Sharing that archive with the photographers themselves is also a quiet way of saying thank you for the time they gave you.

Practical Recommendations for the Road

Ready to start your own French Quarter project? Reach out through the contact page to share your plans, swap notes with other photographers working in the field, or commission a custom set of prints to support the interviews you publish along the way.