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THE SOUTHEAST
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W e d n e s d ay, N ov e m b e r 5, 2025
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Jan Risher LONG STORY SHORT
Make every minute count
Philip Gould captures a moment of Louisiana culture at Fire and Water Fest.
PROVIDED PHOTO BY PHILIP GOULD
FROM BAY TO BAYOU Traveling photographer stays to capture Louisiana
BY JOY HOLDEN Staff writer
Documentary photographer Philip Gould has traveled the world, captured numerous landscapes and a rich variety of people, but nowhere compares to the soul connection he feels in south Louisiana. At the age of 20, San Francisco Bay Area native Gould found his future behind the lens of a camera when his mom bought one that, as he says, “wasn’t half bad.” “It was 1971. I commandeered it and started taking pictures like crazy,” said Gould. The new hobby led him to study journalism at a local community college and a photojournalism degree from San Jose State, knowing that he needed to make photography his career. “It spoke to me loudly,” he said. Right out of college in 1974, Gould landed a job in New Iberia taking pictures for The Daily Iberian. The assignment turned out, for Gould, to be “the best first job a photographer could hope for.” In a town where there was little news, he had free rein to photograph anything
PROVIDED PHOTO BY COLIN GOULD
Photographer Philip Gould testing out a drone for his photography as long as readers enjoyed the pictures. Gould says the opportunity in New Iberia made all the difference in a career that has spanned five decades, multiple countries, several museum exhibitions and more than 20 books. After a year and a half in New Iberia, in 1976, Gould moved to Dallas to work at the Dallas Times Herald. In 1978, the oak
PROVIDED PHOTO BY PHILIP GOULD
Barrier reefs in Point Aux Chien from the book ‘Louisiana from the Sky’
trees, Spanish moss, waterways, music and people lured him back to Acadiana. “I found that Louisiana had a wonderful sense of rootedness,” Gould said, “in that people are from here — and not only that, their ancestors are from here.” He says he liked that it was a French speaking area and that people had a wonderful sense of humor here. “I just somehow viscerally connected to Cajun culture,” he said. That connection led to his first book, “Les Cadiens D’Asteur: Today’s Cajuns,” which was released in 1980, and it became a traveling exhibit. Since then, Gould’s work has been exhibited in the Field Museum of Natural History, the Hilliard University Art Museum, the Louisiana Art & Science Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Gould has created and co-authored 16 books that range from “Ghosts of Good Times,” about abandoned dance halls in south Louisiana to “Bridging the Mississippi,” a conclusive look at every bridge that crosses the Mississippi River — and contributed to many more. His most recent project is “Louisiana from the Sky,” which will be published by UL Press and available Dec. 9.
ä See BAYOU, page 2G
Long distance isn’t a thing anymore — aside from international calls, which can be bypassed by any number of apps or online options. Even still, I remember the first long-distance call I ever received as clear as a bell. I was 14 and was outside playing basketball in the driveway with a half-dozen neighborhood kids. My mother threw open the front door and said, “Jan, you have a long distance call!” Everyone froze, unable to process that someone would be calling one of our motley crew long distance. Back then, a long-distance call was validation. Seconds counted. Someone, somewhere beyond the city limits thought I was worth spending money to reach. After what my mother said registered, I ran inside to the black phone hanging on the kitchen wall. Its long coiled cord stayed tangled. I knew exactly how far I could wander while talking on the phone. “Hello,” I said, breathlessly. A man from Roosevelt State Park in Morton, Mississippi, a whopping 15 miles away, was calling for me. He was calling about a skateboarding contest from the summer before. He worked at the park and remembered that I had won the competition the previous year — which is another story all together. (I had been the only girl in the contest and had won against at least 15 young men, most of whom were well into their 20s. It was the stuff of dreams.) But I digress. This man’s job was to relay to me that park administrators had hoped I would return to defend my title. Much like the legendary (in my own mind) skateboarding contest of the previous summer, this was heady stuff. Alas, I had a job and had to work that Saturday. I was unable to join the skateboard competition again. I remember that I wasn’t even very disappointed. The long-distance phone call (witnessed by friends) was a sort of prize in and of itself. Sitting in the newsroom, considering the difference in attitudes now about receiving phone calls, I looked around to the three 20-somethings who sit near my desk. I had a hunch as to what the answer would be, but I asked anyway. “Do y’all know about longdistance calls?” I said. At 22, the youngest of the trio said, “Do you mean a landline?” I quickly realized that she had no idea long-distance calls had ever been a thing. Another veteran journalist jumped in to help me explain. The 22-year-old was shocked that there used to be charges for calls based on the distance between two places. The other journalist and I went on to explain how much timing mattered with long-distance calls — a long-distance call made in the middle of the day was high dollar. After 5 p.m., the rates dropped and after midnight they dropped even further. We told her that in the not-sodistant history of cellphones, there were charges for roaming and other long-distance features — that if you traveled with your cellphone and called in another region, there were costs that went along with the conve-
ä See RISHER, page 2G