Register

Photographer Profile - Daymon Gardner "I was worried about being in a small market"

By David Schonauer   Tuesday November 22, 2016

Last January 11, the Alabama Crimson Tide met the Clemson Tigers for the 2016 college football championship. New Orleans-based freelance photographer Daymon Gardner, who considers himself “a fairly avid football fan,” would ordinarily have been watching the big game at home. “Or maybe at a bar with friends,” he says.

Instead he attended a drag show.

“And I can tell you it was a good decision,” Gardner says. “I was just blown away by the performances I saw. I had a much better time than I would have had watching the football game.”

The show, called Draguation, was the culmination of the New Orleans Drag Workshop, an intensive three-month program in which students master makeup, costuming and performance skills from Vinsantos Defonte, who has been declared “queen of New Orleans's flourishing and newly burgeoning alternative drag scene” by Vice  magazine. Gardner had been assigned to shoot a story about the workshop by the New Orleans-based magazine Art+Design.

“I went to one of the early sessions and shot portraits of each of the participants, and then I went back for Draguation and shot a second set of portraits to show the transformations that happened,” he says. His strobe-lit photographs, shot in a makeshift studio with a Canon 5D Mark III and 24-70mm lens, blend person and persona.

“I really didn’t know anything about the drag scene in New Orleans until I did this story, and one of the things I love the most about freelance photography is the chance to experience new things,” Gardner says. “I do a lot of portrait work, and I love meeting diverse kinds of people.”

New Orleans is a good place for that. (Writing about the city’s drag culture in Felicity  magazine, Sarah R. Smith noted, “Down here ‘weird’ is the social norm, and imagination and artistry are our bread and butter.”) In other ways, however, the city presents challenges for professional photographers. “New Orleans has a tourism and service-industry economy, so there aren’t many major corporations headquartered here,” says Gardner. “Landing commercial work can be hard.”

Then again, both the city and Gardner have come a long way since he moved there in 2007, just two years after Hurricane Katrina.

After Katrina

A native of Baton Rouge, Gardner attended Louisiana State University, where he studied mass communications and thought about a career in advertising. “I loved photography but didn’t know if it was something I could make a living doing,” he says. He eventually changed his mind about that, and after graduating in 2005 he enrolled at Creative Circus, the art and design school in Atlanta, to build up his portfolio.

Then Katrina hit. His girlfriend — now his wife — was going to nursing school in New Orleans at the time, so he delayed his studies to help her evacuate.

Two years later, after finishing up at Creative Circus, Gardner moved to New Orleans himself. “When I first came here, there were no rental houses for photographers, so I ended up buying my core package of equipment,” he says. “I was worried about being in a small market. I reached out to some other photographers here about assisting, but wasn’t getting many responses. So it was pretty stressful.”

Now, however, Gardner thinks being in New Orleans may have had helped jump start his career. “Because of Katrina, there were a lot of magazines doing stories about the city, and I was getting assignments right away that I wouldn’t have gotten somewhere else,” he says. Over the years he’s shot for GQ, Bon Appetit, the Washington Post, Conde Nast Traveler, United Airlines and New Balance.


One of his most memorable assignments came last year, when ESPN the Magazine assigned him to shoot a story about what was once George Washington Carver Senior High School. After Katrina, the school, located in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, was demolished and replaced by temporary trailers that were hardly temporary. Now a charter school called George Washington Carver Collegiate Academy and George Washington Carver Preparatory Academy, Carver opened the doors of a new permanent facility just this fall.

In 2013, Gardner shot a story about the displaced Carver football team as a personal project. “It was just something I was interested in, how they were coping, so I floated the idea to the school and they said yes,” he says. Gardner spent a day with the team, went to its walk-through practice, then traveled with the players and coaches to a game against Isidore Newman School, the private high school where Payton and Eli Manning once played.

“Then in 2015, when ESPN was preparing a special issue to mark the tenth anniversary of Katrina, the editors reached out to photographers in New Orleans for pictures and story ideas, and I showed them the Carver pictures I’d shot,” says Gardner. “I told them I’d like to do a follow-up story, and they gave me the green light.”

Rising In New Orleans

Gardner’s ESPN portfolio, titled “Rising from the Waters,” is now available in the magazine’s online archive.

The series on Carver and its football team also appears in the American Photography 32 annual. Meanwhile, Gardner’s portraits from the New Orleans Drag Workshop were selected in the American Photographer 31 competition.

Gardner says the photography market in New Orleans has changed considerably since he moved there. “The single rental house then was completely geared to broadcast and video, but they started carrying strobe gear about two years ago,” he says. “There are also more studio spaces to rent. And the film industry has been big here since Katrina, so that has brought in a lot of stylists and wardrobe people.”

He’s also made professional strides. Last year Men's Journal Deputy Art Director Kim Gray praised Gardner’s lighting in Rangefinder  magazine, citing his portrait of Noah Galloway, a double amputee war hero-turned-personal trainer, model and Dancing with the Stars  contestant.

There are still challenges, though. “One ad agency I have been working with here lost four of its major accounts in the past three years,” Gardner says. “Two of the accounts went out of state, and one them was for New Orleans tourism, which is a little ironic.”

He’s adapting by revamping his website and sending out his first printed promotional piece. “My website is going to be a lot more sports-oriented than before,” Gardner says. “Sports is definitely a big interest of mine, though I’ve never been a die-hard fan like a lot people in Baton Rouge with LSU football. It hasn’t taken over my life, and I know quite a few people that that has happened to.”

The emphasis on sports, he says, is a response to the kinds assignments that have been presented to him. “It’s the first time that I’m trying to define my career in a particular way,” he says. “I’m a little nervous about it, because I want to be able to pick up as many kinds of work as I can here.”




Profiles