Shot of the Day – 15 – NOMA Archer

Hercules the Archer, New Orleans Museum of Art (21 June 2005)

After I left New Orleans, the Museum of Art added a fine sculpture garden. The museum is in City Park, a great expanse of land north of downtown that contained, among other things, a stadium, golf course, miniature railroad, ponds and scads of grand live oak trees. It was a great place for early morning runs before work…since our house was just two blocks away.

This picture was taken during the first post-retirement Road Trip (Roman numeral I, as the Chronicles record it)…and just two months before Katrina changed everything. I had freed myself from the work-a-day life and was reveling in chasing down presidents’ grave sites and seeing anything else that caught my attention at my own pace.

The statue, created in 1909 and cast in 1947, is by the French sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle. The NOMA web site will take you to an image of the work but I chose to shoot it from a different perspective…one that is less documentary and more blended with the surrounding vegetation…as a hunter might lie in wait for his prey.

The fun and the challenge of photography is to present a known object in a way it hasn’t been seen before. After the storm, I suspect much of the vegetation was damaged and it may no longer be possible to view the sculpture this way.