Leadership
Leslie Tabony
Secretary
A self-taught digital photographer based in New Orleans, LA, leslie Tabony, is an artist using her own associations as she creates narratives which focus on the sublime and the ethereal.
The relationship of longing, sensuality and spirituality are often explored in her love of the portraiture of women.
Her work uses unusual light, diffusion, soft focus, a pictorial aesthetic and compositions to find the beauty in paring a visceral emotion amidst paradoxical extremes.
Infinitude, vulnerability, submission, reverence, sexuality, stillness, and quietude are weaved together — So too are poetry, philosophy, eras of times gone by — 18th, 19th and early 20th century.
Her work is mostly black and white, but sepia, duotones and even colour are used depending on the Body of Work.
Eli Mergel
President
Before getting into photography on a professional level Eli worked to be a community builder, Founding some early tech, hacking adjacent meetups in NYC that turned into competitive gaming competitions, startups, and media companies. Leaving that scene after running events for Microsoft, and other competitive gaming companies at the time became too corporate. He pivoted to working for magazines, Video Production, Marketing, and providing Technical consulting for companies that valued his unique perspective, hands on self taught skills, and security background.
Eli has gained a large portfolio in event, street, and architectural photography over the years. With a career in Information Technology and a past life within the Marines, Eli has the advantage of being on the cutting-edge while also being down-to-earth. When he is not in NYC shooting candid street, he can be found in New Orleans shooting street events and local culture.
Justine Crowley
Treasurer
Justine Crowley has been capturing her vision of the world since she was three years old. She describes herself as a photorealist capturing landscape, architecture, and portrait, coming to realize that theme across all her subjects. Justine synthesizes the abstraction of the every day into shapes and colors and elements, often making the viewer take a second look to process the photograph. She has participated in juried shows across the country. Her last solo show was on Dirty Linen Night 2024 at Salon Diversions. Crowley started shooting in black and white early; and even still has the negatives from her third roll of film. She now shoots with everything from her iPhone to her father’s Yashica Range Finder to her Canon 6d DSLR and her Hasselblad 500C/M. Justine lives in New Orleans with her dog and two cats.
Board of Directors
Daniella Zalcman
Board Member
Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based in New Orleans. She is a Catchlight Fellow, a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists.
Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. Her work has been recognized with the Arnold Newman Prize, an ICP Infinity Award, a National Magazine Award, a Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award, the FotoEvidence Book Award, and the Magnum Foundation’s Inge Morath Award.
Daniella is also currently a Professor of Practice at Tulane University where she teaches Community Engagement Journalism, Photojournalism, and the Ethics of Visual Media.
Nicolas Boulier
Board Member
Nicolas BOULIER founded the only gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary photography in the Deep South. It was a no-brainer for him when he decided to renovate a historic building in New Orleans’ arts district. Throughout his many professional lives, he used the still images. To encourage, influence, raise awareness, interest, sell, seduce, attract or even move. The double exposure school recalls him the capital of surrealism, the City of Magritte, BRUSSELS, where he worked for 3 years. He would have dreamed of using double exposure to reinforce his efforts propagandist … or on the contrary escape!
EMRE KARAOĞLU
Board Vice President
Emre Karaoglu, a contemporary figurative artist from Turkiye now based in New Orleans, uses oil, pastel, charcoal, and photography to capture the profound layers of human experience in everyday life.
‘Emotion, connection, and culture are infused within my paintings. I meticulously focus on silhouettes and the changing states of the human experience. I am an observer and an archivist of modern-day culture. The body of artworks that I am creating is “up close and personal.” They are intimate moments with people around me and strangers in physical proximity. I am a witness to other people’s lives.’
Emre’s painting was selected for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition 2024, at the Mall Galleries, London, UK. Three of Emre’s artworks are in the permanent ‘How You Doin’, New Orleans?’ & “Art of the Black Experience” collection of the City of New Orleans. His artworks were selected as a part of “the State of the Art: Record Zine Project” at the LSU Museum of Art, Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge in 2022.
Emre’s artworks were selected as a part of “Refreshing America” International Art Show at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, 2025. Emre’s paintings were selected for the 16th and 17th Annual Louisiana Fine Arts Showcase at the President’s residence at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond in 2023 and 2024. Emre’s artworks were selected for the New Orleans Art Association (NOAA) 2023 and 2024 National Show and received the Merit Award.
Recent solo shows include “The Rhythm of Streets” at Sullivan Gallery, New Orleans, 2025, “Witness”, Second Story Gallery, New Orleans Healing Center, 2024, and “Faces Around Us”, 2023, Sullivan Gallery, New Orleans. He belongs to the artist collective, “Renegade” and “Second Story Gallery,” in New Orleans. Since Emre immigrated to New Orleans, he has curated shows at The Front Gallery, Gallery Huracan, Second Story Gallery, and New Orleans Photo Alliance.
Emre has participated in group exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, the LSU Museum of Art, the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, Southeastern Louisiana University, Gryder Gallery, LeMieux Galleries, Gallery Huracan, and Shreveport Artspace.
In Turkey, Emre’s artworks have been selected for World Art Day with UNESCO, the Exhibition for Turkish National Anthem CKSM, Turkish Republic Day at Akdeniz University, and International Women’s Day Dokumapark MSG.
Richard McCabe
Board Member
Richard McCabe is a curator, photographer and writer based in New Orleans. He was born in England and grew up in the American South. In 1998, he received an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University. Since 2010, he has been the Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He has organized and curated over thirty exhibitions including: Seeing Beyond the Ordinary, The Mythology of Florida, The Rising, Eudora Welty: Photographs from the 1930s – 40s, The Colourful South, Self-Processing: Instant Photography, Memory is a Strange Bell: The Art of William Christenberry and New Southern Photography.
Richard McCabe’s photographs have been included in gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the United States including: Size Matters, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama, Instant Joy, AM Richard Fine Art Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, and Once Around The Sun, Boyd/Satellite Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2017, AINT – BAD press published LAND STAR, a monograph of McCabe’s photography. McCabe’s thoughts and writings on photography have been published in the New York Times, Time, National Public Radio(NPR),Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Spot, The Bitter Southerner, AINT – BAD, Hotshoe, Huck and LENSCRATCH magazine. In 2018, he contributed the introduction essay –The Reality on the Ground for the University of New Orleans press publication: New Southern Photography: Images of the Twenty-first Century South.
This could be you
Board Member
This could be you
Board Member
Gallery Staff
Raymond Goscrand
Gallery Staff
Photographer based in New Orleans, with ties in Houston
Camille Barnett
Director of Communications and Programs
Camille Barnett is a New Orleans-native creative. With a minor and journalism and over 6 years of professional experience as a photographer/photojournalist, she is accustomed to telling stories and telling them with care. When not telling stories through camera or pen, she serves as coordinator and project manger in the production world as well as for local nonprofits.
Amy James
Gallery Queen
Amy James’s photographs can only be described as transcendent and natural. She prefers to shoot while illuminating her subjects using only natural light and environments. This practice helps her to capture the sitter as well as the viewer in her lens.
Amy James shoots primarily in black and white, the traditional way, using silver and film. She was trained as a painter but was drawn to the darkroom upon learning it could create as much of a challenge as the empty canvas. James studied at LSU under Michael Crespo and Robert Hausey with Thomas Neff, her photography professor, perhaps being her greatest influence and mentor. James exhibits in many venues throughout the South with permanent exhibits displayed in Ruston, Baton Rouge, Birmingham and Dallas.
Her writings and photography have been published regionally in magazines such as Louisiana Home & Garden, Country Roads, Delta Style, and nationally in Veranda and Ladies Home Journal, and internationally in SHOTS magazine
Ali Saunders
Gallery Staff
Alexandra “Ali” Saunders is an up-and-coming writer and photographer from Harvard, Massachusetts. She is currently studying English at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her work varies but is mostly focused on what she believes to be most important: empathy and love. Saunders work spans from poems to beautiful film images, op-eds, children’s stories, compositions, and more. She adores capturing the world through film photography, especially her beautiful home in Massachusetts, where she is very proud to have been born and raised. Aside from her creative work, Saunders is a Division 1 Track & Field Athlete. She loves the Boston Red Sox, Princess Diana, and being with people she loves.
PhotoNOLA Committee
Ashley Gates
PhotoNOLA
Brian Piper
PhotoNOLA
This could be you
PhotoNOLA
This could be you
PhotoNOLA
This could be you
PhotoNOLA
Advisory
Jane Fulton Alt
Advisory
Jane Fulton Alt was born in Chicago in 1951 and began exploring the visual arts while pursuing a career as a clinical social worker. Her award-winning photography explores theuniversality of the human condition and the non-materialworld. Alt received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MA from the University of Chicago. She studied at the Evanston Art Center, as well as at Columbia College and the Art Institute of Chicago. Alt is the author of Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward (2009) and The Burn (2013) and Still Life: A Photographers Journey Through Grief and Gardening (2026). Her portfolio “Crude Awakening” appeared in publications worldwide.
Owen Murphy
Advisory
Felicita Felli Maynard
Advisory
Felicita Felli Maynard is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and archivist from Brooklyn, NYC. Maynard works across many forms of analog and alternative process photography, sculpture, sound, and installation. Their work explores the rituals and practices of survival and prosperity of queer and trans descendants of the African Diaspora. They weave together the past, present, and future to create multidimensional archival spaces. Maynard examines how communities and landscapes shaped by colonialism and capitalism forge and sustain other worlds through acts of world-making. Maynard earned their MFA in Photography from Tulane University (2023) and their BFA in Photography from CUNY Brooklyn College (2017). While at Tulane, they were a Mellon Fellow in Community-Engaged Scholarship (2021-2023). Maynard is a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow (2018-19), BRIC Media Fellow (2018-19), Queer | Art Mentorship Fellow (2020), Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow (2020), and a Solidarity Fellow with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab. They have participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (2018-19), BRIC (2019-2020), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), and the Joan Mitchell Center (2026). Maynard works between New Orleans and New York City.
Judy Cooper
Advisory
Judy Cooper lives and works in New Orleans. After earning a Ph. D. in French language and literature and teaching for a few years, she decided to embark on a career as a photographer. She worked for a number of years as a free lance photographer specializing in fine art photography. From 1998 to 2015, she was the staff photographer at the New Orleans Museum of Art all the while pursuing her own personal photography.
Her personal work has been shown in numerous regional and national exhibitions. She has been a member of the Photo Alliance since its founding in 2006.
Emad Jabbar
Advisory
George Long
Advisory