D. Eric Bookhardt

D. Eric Bookhardt (April 8, 1946 - November 8, 2019) or David Eric Bookhardt was an American art critic, curator, and photographer based in New Orleans. Bookhardt wrote for New Orleans' weekly publication, Gambit. He also wrote for OffBeat, Sculpture Magazine, and ART PAPERS, where he served as regional editor.

Early life and education Bookhardt was born and raised in New Orleans. His father's family was from North Georgia and his mother's family from Belize. He attended the University of New Orleans and, in the late 1960s, moved to New York City, where he worked as an archivist at the Museum of Modern Art. When he returned to New Orleans, he pursued photography in the 1970s and 1980s. He also began writing art criticism for Gambit.

He first appeared in the pages of ART PAPERS as a reviewer in the November/December 1980 issue, and as New Orleans contributing editor in the September/October 1982 issue. He wrote regularly for the magazine until the Winter 2017/2018 issue, in which he reviewed the fourth iteration of Prospect New Orleans.

"Eric’s essays and reviews familiarized ART PAPERS’ geographically diverse readership with the contents and context of regionally distinct styles of contemporary art, specifically ones that responded to the creolized society of New Orleans and related portions of Louisiana. As a New Orleans native of Belizean background, he was singularly sensitive to the variety of cultures that met and mingled in a city whose art addressed challenging contemporary issues long before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina made other Americans recognize the complexity of a culture previously known mostly for Mardi Gras and the tourist pleasures of the French Quarter."

"What we see reflects what can happen when the imagination meanders through the dusky realms where cultural history and the psyche overlap and reveal veiled insights into the poetics of the feminine and the ever-shifting, sometimes elusive, nature of reality itself."

His photographic archive includes photographs featured in Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans as well as those his lesser-known publication, Mirages: Photographs of New Orleans (Aurian Society Press, 1975). Bookhardt's photographs were presented in A Century of Vision/Un Siècle de Vision: Louisiana 1884 - 1984, organized by Herman Mhire, at the University Art Museum at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette in 1986.

Bookhardt's archive consists of hundreds of negatives as well as black and white photographic prints. Most photographs were shot in New Orleans, but also in San Francisco and New York City in the 1970s. Several photographs of celebrities and musicians such as Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Little Queenie are included. The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) has several photographs by Bookhardt in their collection.

Curatorial projects Bookhardt's curatorial forays include Radical Photography at Nexus Gallery (now Atlanta Contemporary Art Center) in 1984, which included New Orleans' photographer George Dureau alongside his more well-known contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. Bookhardt's writing makes clear that Dureau's life and work so greatly influenced Robert Mapplethorpe that Mapplethorpe restaged Dureau's early photographs as a form of homage.

"In photography, this city and the surrounding region have long been a spawning ground for visionary or magic realist imagery dating to Clarence John Laughlin's surrealist works of the 1930s," writes Bookhardt. "Today a coterie of younger emerging artists, often reflecting alternative socio-cultural milieus, have in concert with their more established peers expanded this visionary vocabulary."