Florestine Perrault Collins

Florestine Perrault Collins was born on January 20, 1895, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a large Catholic Creole family descended from free people of color. Hers was a household of modest means but real dignity, and as a child she left school early to help support her family, entering the working world while still very young.

At about the age of fourteen, in 1909, she began learning photography as an assistant to established studio photographers. In a segregated South that barred Black women from many trades, she navigated the color line — at times passing as white — to gain the training and employment that the era otherwise denied her. She mastered the full craft of the studio, from posing and lighting to the delicate art of hand-coloring finished prints.

By 1920 she was making portraits in her own living room, and by the mid-1930s she had opened a commercial studio in the South Rampart Street corridor, the heart of Black business life in New Orleans. In the 1920 U.S. Census she was the sole African American woman photographer listed in the city — among only about a hundred nationwide. For decades she photographed First Communions, weddings, graduations, soldiers, families, and children, rendering Black New Orleans with pride and sophistication rather than the degrading stereotypes of the day.

She retired in 1949 and later moved to Los Angeles, where she died on April 4, 1988. Through the enduring scholarship of her grandniece Arthé A. Anthony, her images survive as a luminous archive of a people who insisted on being seen with grace. May the honored image-keeper of Black New Orleans be remembered with the dignity she gave to every face before her lens.