Signs of Home

The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the privatization of public space and the impacts of these respatializations on New Orleans as a place. The images in the essay provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering” from hurricanes and other disasters.