Seacoast History Blog #107
March 5, 2011  

I was in my Newmarket, NH apartment – a farmhouse now the site of a funeral home -- in February of 1973 when the phone rang.  

“Hey man,” the unfamiliar voice hooted on the other end. “It’s me Johnny Donnels and I want you to talk to someone.” 

“Hi, there!” the next enthusiastic voice shouted. “I’m Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and I hope you’ll come down and join us for Mardi Gras this year.” 

I didn’t know who Rambin’ Jack was, but I had heard of Mardi Gras, the blow-out block party in a world unlike my Puritan planet. Peter Graves, the man from the TV show Mission Impossible and Al Hirt the trumpet player were at Donnels studio too. They were already partying smack in the middle of the French Quarter.  (Continued below)

So with only a few months left in my college career and a few dollars in my pocket, I grabbed my backpack and took my first plane ride from icy New Hampshire to the southern sauna they call New Orleans.  

I know I went because I recently found a photograph that Johnny Donnels took of me there. I’m posing in the middle of the Fat Tuesday parade with Pete Fountain the clarinet player. Fountain’s was the parade marshal and his face was emblazoned on the golden coins tossed from giant floats that rolled through the streets. I couldn’t quite fit the picture in my scanner, but most of it is there. The guy on the right was the Mayor, I assume the mayor of New Orleans. I’m holding a camera in the picture, but I don’t recall ever taking any photographs. In fact, I don’t recall much. What I do remember comes out in ribbons of color like a Jackson Pollack painting and is beyond any words I’ve learned.  

I was there because John liked a review of his photography that I had written weeks before in the campus newspaper. I bumped into an exhibit of his work while wandering through the University of New Hampshire student union building. I was drawn to the unique black & white images of New Orleans and the way Donnels had shamelessly manipulated them in the darkroom in an era long before PhotoShop. I penned a review. John saw it somehow and invited me down for the eye-popping street festival. 

I sacked out on the couch on the second floor of his studio at 634 St. Peter Street. I’m sure there were other people camping there, but the only one I remember was Jim Cornfield, then editor of Peterson’s Photographic magazine. Cornfield was testing out a new kind of Polaroid film that allowed him to make gigantic poster-sized images. He had cases of film and some sort of chemical wash or fixer. I remember that smell mixed in the sultry heat with the odors of fried food, stale beer, every range of human sweat, fireworks, and perfume. 

My job was to “just have fun” but, being a Yankee, I needed to do something, so a couple of times John let me manage his shop as he whisked away on his bicycle. He had 100 prints on display with many copies of each print mounted on cardboard and wrapped in plastic. The prints were pre-autographed and set in rows of large wooden bins that viewers flipped like record albums. Everything was $25. The studio was on the ground floor in one of those classic French Quarter buildings with the wrought-iron balcony and the inner courtyard. Years before Donnels had been a neighbor to playwright Tennessee Williams. 

John Donnels and his friends – some famous, some unknown – sat upstairs drinking beer and playing ping-pong – while tourists thumbed through the photos on the floor below. John had rigged up a camera so he could watch people in his shop and he had a speaker so he could talk to them without getting out his chair. When customers wanted to buy a picture, he instructed them remotely to hold the photo up to the camera. 

“Oh, that’s a good one,” he’d say into his mocrophone. “Now hold up your money.” 

The customer held his cash up for the camera and then deposited it into a basket just below the camera. When John ran low on copies of the most popular photos, he went into the darkroom and made a dozen more. 

I ran the store for an hour or two one day and took in $200. When John returned, he handed me $100 as my “cut” of the deal. Having never had $100 before, and being in the midst of the Mardi Gras insanity, I went out and bought $100 worth of plastic beaded necklaces, the kind that everyone trades for all sorts of lascivious favors during the festivities. We threw them from the balcony as if were royalty tossing crumbs of bread to the starving mob below. 

My other job was to wander through the crowds and find really interesting looking people like jazz musicians and street performers whom I coaxed back to the studio. There Jim Cornfield posed them and photographed them and made nearly-life-sized posters that hung all around the studio. He took one of me with two astonishing women, but when I wrote for the picture later, it was gone. Somewhere among his stunning images of bullfights and great whites and travel images from across the globe – Jim lost me. He did send me four photos of guys that I had rounded up from the streets. They were the winners of a drag costume contest taking place a few blocks away, and I marched them to the studio like the world’s strangest army. One picture shows a heavyset man dressed as a nun. Another skinny guy is wearing silk stockings, sequins, platform shoes, and a fireman’s hat. The portraits hung over the couch in my various apartments for decades to the great confusion of my guests. 

There’s more to this adventure, but common decency prevails. I do recall sitting on the handlebars of John’s bicycle as he wheeled me through the streets of New Orleans to his home where I dined with his family in a saner, even serene environment. Then we pedaled back into the insanity of the Mardi Gras. 

After a few days (I could not say how many) I got the feeling that the photographer was wondering who the guy was sleeping in his studio. I was a non-party animal living inside the biggest party in the nation. So I bought John’s new book “New Orleans / Vieux Carre” (1973) with some money he loaned me and flew home. We corresponded briefly, but there was nothing connecting us besides the single essay I had written in a college newspaper. He autographed my book “to a creative friendship.” 

I was pleased recently, after almost 40 years, to discover that Johnny Donnels had a Web site, still featuring many of the pictures I had sold from the shop decades before. I was about to pen a quick note when I noticed a memo on the Web site. The artist, it said, had passed on at age 84. He survived Katrina, stages a 50-year retrospective of his work, and moved on. It was a pleasure – and I mean that in the most hedonistic sense of the word – to share his party from the second floor balcony. It was brief and lush and more than enough for me. 

Copyright © 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.