This is the fifth story in our series chronicling the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
All photos by Polo Silk unless noted.
NEW ORLEANS — There weren’t always a pair of security guards standing outside of Big Man’s Lounge in Uptown New Orleans.
As a teenager in the early 1980s, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell remembers how his elders, his parents, aunties, and uncles, would stuff into the club in their Sunday best to listen to R&B tunes. But that was just the appetizer for what he saw as the neighborhood’s Sunday meal.
As Polo Silk, 61, recalled outside the club this month, once “that 12 a.m. hit, the whole night changed.” DJs spun breakthrough tracks, igniting the energy that would define the city’s current music culture.
Big Man’s Lounge played a role in birthing New Orleans’ rap scene. It served as a launch pad for local artists and introduced club audiences to an emerging sound. But it famously held off on playing rap music until midnight, when the younger crowd would line up for hours just to hear it.
It was there, where rappers and DJs during the early 1990s created a new local style of hip-hop that was eventually christened “bounce,” giving way to a dominant national musical run by New Orleans rappers for over a decade.
It was a place of celebration and joy, and also where Polo, arguably the city’s most prolific street photographer, got his start behind the lens and rose to prominence photographing New Orleans artists like Juvenile, Lil Wayne, and Magnolia Shorty.
For 40 years, Polo has been inseparable from the city’s cultural fabric. He has captured tens of thousands of vivid moments of Black joy, fashion, and community from the heart of its street corners, Black clubs, and legendary second lines.
With a Polaroid in hand and custom airbrushed backdrops created by his cousin Otis Spears, Polo transformed parking lots and block parties into portable portrait studios, offering New Orleanians the chance to star in their own stories. The wicker peacock chair was a must, too. At the time, it was an act of celebration, but today it can be seen as self-preservation.
For example, those security guards outside Big Man’s, he said, show the city’s transformation since Hurricane Katrina changed everything in 2005. Random acts of violence and quick tempers have only increased since then, fueled by community fractures.
Growing up, Big Man’s was the meeting point for residents in two neighboring housing projects, The Calliope Projects and Magnolia Projects. But the closure and demolition of Uptown New Orleans housing projects after Katrina displaced thousands of residents. It also broke up tightly knit communities and support networks, which created a vacuum that fueled increased violence and instability as former residents were scattered across unfamiliar neighborhoods with fewer resources and safety nets.
He wants people to remember it wasn’t always that way — and it doesn’t have to continue to be this way.
His photos, he argues, are a testament to the power of Black art as a means of healing, remembrance, and reclamation in the wake of communal loss.
As Hurricane Katrina’s devastation swept many family albums and archives into oblivion, Polo’s vast collection of thousands of physical photos has emerged as a rare, irreplaceable time capsule safeguarding the visual legacy of pre-Katrina Black New Orleans. His images chronicle not only New Orleans’ explosive bounce and hip-hop scenes, but also a broader narrative of Black identity and pride, carefully stitched together.
“It’s like a whole different life that we endure in the city since Katrina,” explained Walter Sandifer, co-founder of Keep It In The Culture, a Black New Orleans second line group. “We had to pick up and get out — those of us who were able to — and when we came back, nothing was the same. These snippets of art and culture before the storm mean so much because of that.”
For the last several years, he has been on a mission to “bless” New Orleanians with framed photos of themselves from his pre-Katrina archive.
Polo has “been just a blessing for me,” one recipient recently noted, adding how meaningful it was to just remember. And it brought him back to a lost moment: “That’s me when I was me,” he said, about seeing a photo of himself pre-Katrina.
“My art is a worldwide gift for Black people,” Polo said. “I hold on to the memory of people that are no longer here.” According to his count, he has photographs of over 500 Black New Orleanians who lost their life to violence. He wears that grief in his face.
Polo didn’t set out to be an archivist, but has been there for all of it, long before the city’s culture became a talking point in galleries and art magazines. He stumbled into it, capturing nightlife, block parties, and second lines, simply because it was a part of his life. He is as much a participant as a documentarian, drawn into conversations, dap and hugs exchanged before the camera clicks.
“People can see the love,” he said, “and they need the love.”
Polo’s images often bridge time. He might have photographed a friend “thuggin’ with their girl in the club” one night, then smiling with their children at a Sunday second line months later. “I would make sure to document all of these moments,” he said, “and give it to them so they can have that for their walls, for their families. My thing is, there ain’t no love like remembering.”
His work is anchored in a New Orleans that, in many ways, no longer exists. “The city done changed … a lot,” he explained. Pre‑Katrina, the neighborhoods along parade routes and the faces you’d see every weekend were constellations of familiarity. “I had spots where I knew people,” he said, “but it’s not the same.” Yet his photographs carry these lost configurations of place and community.
The relationships he’s built with the city’s people mean his images carry a pulse that an outsider’s lens can rarely capture. He can understand what it means that some of those houses are gone and some of those faces, too, but he can make sure that at least New Orleans doesn’t forget because of the reciprocity of his work.
The people in his pictures trust him because he is one of them. “A lot of people I built relationships with are family now because of my camera,” he said.
Recognition has come — features in major art magazines, solo exhibitions in New Orleans, and beyond. Still, he frames these as milestones rather than motivators.
“There’s a whole difference in my work compared to what you see from other photographers,” he said, because it wasn’t built on assignment. “I wasn’t doing it to pay my bills,” he said.
Whether in a nightclub under neon lights or at a daylight procession down a cracked avenue, Polo insists that every subject matters and every moment belongs in the record. He hopes his photographs help Black New Orleanians remember who they are, where they’ve been, and what still connects them despite the distances Katrina, gentrification, and time have tried to impose.
When asked what he most wants people to take from his work, he distilled it simply: “Love and care.”
“That has always been the biggest part of us in New Orleans, and that doesn’t come from the French Quarters or the Superdome,” he said.
Today, many see the contemporary art scene in New Orleans as disconnected from the city’s real heartbeat, with its accolades often going to those far removed from the lived experience.
But Polo makes sure people never forget “the real New Orleans,” and he want you to know it’s “New Orleans, not ‘NOLA.’”
Polo’s work can be found here.
