GERVAISE SOEUROUGE: NOT FADE AWAY on view now at U.N.O. St. Claude Gallery 2429 Saint Claude Avenue New Orleans, LA 70117 Saturdays + Sundays 12-5 pm through April 5, 2026, featuring Soeurouge’s analog + digital archives, video homage, reprints of early punk etc. artists + personal effects + programming, curated by Veronica Cross. *Masks are available.
It was by chance or spirit that during a sales call to manage a local estate sale I spied a photo of Johnny Rotten from early punk band The Sex Pistols on a refrigerator as the walkthrough was winding down. When I asked about the photo, the estate’s executrix Faun Fenderson cooly said, “Oh, there’s more”, with a glint in her eye, retrieving a folder with photos of punk bands including a 1978 Sex Pistols performance in Baton Rouge (?!) That folder would be a portal to the work and life of Gervaise Soeurouge (1944-2022), a Louisiana-born peripatetic music photographer specializing in punk and emerging music.
Among her possessions, a bomber jacket with “Gervaise Photographer” labels on the front and “Sham 69 British Tour 80” emblazoned on the back affirms her participation and reminds us how significant tour photographers were to crafting a band’s image in a time before social media and the Internet. Her archives would reveal themselves in waves over several months into nearly-years. As Faun assembled multiple digital photo files (she was a close friend), she also requested Gervaise’s remaining boxes of photos, test prints, slides, and negatives from friends and contacts in the UK and Madrid, featuring music scenes in England, New York, Montreal, Baton Rouge, and beyond.
New York friends Sur Rodney (Sur), an “archivist, curator, artistic collaborator, lover, surrealist, and cultural commentator” and Susan Stoltz, a visual artist and a keeper of Downtown NYC visual art history, provided anecdotes and information. Additionally, Sur contributed slides of Gervaise’s circa 1980s collaborative photoshoot with Breda Part featuring John Lydon (Johnny Rotten as he was known post-Sex Pistols), and Stoltz lent her Portrait of Gervaise Soeurouge oil on canvas portrait – from her series of NYC women artist portraits - to the exhibition.
Consider these acts of gathering, organizing, and sharing as caregiving. The overseas deliveries included personal photos, offering more insight and raising more questions about Gervaise and the worlds she occupied. To avoid speculation, the information attending this exhibition is based on oral history from conversations with Gervaise’s friends and from relevant cultural research. The unknowns of her story can remain as such until we learn otherwise. (An inventory of the artists in her present-day archives appears on page 3.)
The intimacy of her professional and personal relationships is seen in pre-show photos with musicians such as Willie Nelson, who was reportedly also a friend, and in captures of Gervaise herself, her musician husband Edi Chin-Lee (1948-2023), and what appears to be family members in their gardens, with their cars, at seafood restaurants with oversized crustaceans, and Louisiana cemetery plots. At least one subject offers a gaze of hazy love to the camera. A photo of a crowd gathered outside a gallery opening in SOHO, NYC, bears the stamp of her St. Marks Place NYC address where she lived with Sur. This is one of two address stamps found on the backsides of her prints, the other being her Camden, London home.
Gervaise and Edi returned to Louisiana where they would spend their final years in New Orleans’ Marigny neighborhood. In England, Camden-based Edi had been the bassist with British band The Tourists and worked as a session musician for artists such as the French American disco group Santa Esmeralda, and other outfits. As Gervaise suffered from Alzheimer’s dementia and took to wandering in the evenings, friends and neighbors looked out for her. A little red book contains reminder notes to herself and important phone numbers – including her own. Her full married name was Gervaise Marie Smelser-Soeurouge Chin-Lee.
Gervaise Soeurouge: Not Fade Away at U.N.O. St. Claude Gallery is the first posthumous exhibition of her archives; a 2024 exhibition of her archives scheduled at Baton Rouge gallery Yes We Cannibal was cancelled due to an urgent health issue. This exhibition includes original slides and enlarged archival inkjet prints from her black and white negatives and contact sheets, and related archival materials in addition to a video projection Gervaise Soeurouge: Not Fade Away which featuring her photo archives, with a soundtrack score by Skip Bolen. Gervaise’s photos remind us of the circularity of culture and history, particularly in her digital files documenting a Rock Against Racism show and Anti-Nazi protests in addition to other unidentified organized actions in England; these images are seen in the video projection. Her photos live on in British magazines like Melody Maker, with her Teardrop Explodes photo (1979), and The Face, featuring the Buzzcocks (1980); neither set of photos appear in her present archives, however. In perfect kismet synchronicity, U.N.O. Gallery director Tony Campbell lent a bootleg record of The Sex Pistols live at the Kingfish in Baton Rouge 1978 show to the exhibition, featuring Gervaise’s photos that are predictably uncredited.
Lines drawn around selected photos on her contact sheets show us her preference for dynamic, iconic moments of action slated for publications, record covers, or other assignments. Relatedly, Gervaise was also proficient in JVC video, having earned her undergraduate degree in communications at Concordia University in Montreal, CA, where she also taught. She is acknowledged as an additional cameraperson for the Woodstock Music Festival in1969, in the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB), though not officially credited. In London, Gervaise made videos documenting women artists such as Susan Hiller in the “automatic script” video, ‘Susan Hiller/Writing Her Own Script’ from Hands Off in 1984. Chat Rap, 1983, is a 15-minute British video directed by John Scarlett-Davis, in which Gervaise is listed as a contributor alongside Duncan Ward, Volker Stocks, David Robilliard, and Adair Brouwer. This video appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2018 exhibition Performing the Self.
We offered programming during the exhibition’s timeline starting with the touring 309 Punk Project Show with Aaron Cometbus + Scott Satterwhite and special guests Miss Pussycat and The Official La Reina on March 18th. On March 21, New Orleans-based photographers Skip Bolen, Beau Patrick Coulon, and Rodrigo Delgado Jr. discussed their own work with us as part of a continuum of photographers who are invested in live music (particularly punk) and public gatherings such as parades and protests. I interviewed Dan Fox about his experience as Editor and Publisher of ANTIGRAVITY magazine, a New Orleans independent news resource of reviews, interviews, columns on health, civics, and culture and the Voter Education Guide on March 27. Our final event was an exhibition walkthrough supported by additional objects from Gervaise’s archives such as her Sham 69 1980 “photographer” tour jacket, cameras, test prints, and other archival elements on April 4.
A sincere THANK YOU to Faun Fenderson, Sur Rodney (Sur), Susan Stoltz, Tony Campbell, Steven Maklansky, Skip Bolen, and the gallery-sitter U.N.O. students. Stay tuned for updates and additional opportunities to learn more about Gervaise Soeurouge and her world.
- Veronica Cross, curator of Gervaise Soeurouge: Not Fade Away and Manager of Gervaise Soeurouge’s Archives
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THE LOUISIANA PUNK ARCHIVES is a project-in-development inspired by the cultural storytelling of Gervaise Soeurouge’s photographs and the multifaceted Punk movements of Louisiana that continue to evolve, shape-shift, give voice to people, and inspire.is a project-in-development inspired directly by the cultural storytelling of her photographs and the multifaceted Punk movements of Louisiana that continue to evolve, shape-shift, give voice to, and inspire. The goal is to create a digital archive of Souerouge’s work and invite members of Louisiana Punk to contribute digital files of photos, flyers, and album art through community scanning dates with an option to upload files remotely. In this way, Gervaise Sourouge’s trailblazing documentation lives on, in community with others over time and space for next generations to enjoy. As contemporary photographers document the creative underground, they also reveal the urgent social justice concerns of our times, just as Soeurouge’s reportage of England’s Anti-Fascist movement and Rock Against Racism shows did. This project is in its early phase. We thank the estate of Gervaise Soeurouge and her close friends for the support and greenlight for this project.
*the content and image on this website may not be reproduced without written permission by the estate or author
Self Portrait, Gervaise Soeurouge, date unknown, used with permission of the estate
