South Louisiana residents commemorate All Saints’ Day, November 1, by going at nightfall to newly cleaned and flower-decorated graveyards and placing lighted candles on the graves to honor the dead. This ritual still has great vitality in Lacombe, and it is practiced in several other Louisiana communities, though it is little known in other parts of the United States (where All Saints’ Day is nonetheless a Catholic Holy Day of Obligation and marked in other ways).

All Saints’ has long been an important day in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, brought from France as La Toussaint (a name for the day which is still used in French-speaking and French-influenced areas of the state). The above-ground cemeteries of the Crescent City, themselves such a distinctive feature of the urban landscape, were virtually mobbed on All Saints’ in the 19th century and earlier decades of the twentieth century. The wood engravings of the nineties and the photographs of the thirties show cemetery aisles packed with people, tombs festooned with flowers or beaded immortelles. It was a time for families to get together and for general socializing, a festive day for most. Vendors lined the streets selling tamales, popcorn and pralines, or perhaps la biere creole, a beer brewed out of pineapple pulp and fruit juice, according to Gumbo Ya-Ya.

The country around Lacombe, a town of 5,000 about a fifteen minute drive from the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, is woodsy with a mixture of fragrant, tall pines and moss-dripping oaks, and houses cozily ensconced under the trees. The land is different in Lafitte, south of New Orleans in the southern end of Jefferson Parish twenty minutes from the West Bank, more open, with houses and docks and moored commercial fishing vessels almost crowded along the banks of busy Bayou Barataria. The cemeteries here are small and mostly line the banks of the bayou too, several of them narrow wedges between water and road. Years ago the only access to them was by the water route or the narrow footpath that rims the bayou’s side. It is truly a spactacular sight to see and I do enjoy the quiet spirituality of the event each time I am able to be there to photograph.

Many of the tombs are over 100 years old and show some signs of age.

As most of you know, I still work as a freelancer for the AP in addition to being a full-time wedding and portrait photographer. I have photographed most major storms form Andrew to Katrina and all the smaller ones in between. So, today work began at O dark-thirty photographing what was Hurricane and now is Tropical Storm Ida. Here are a few images.