Baquet first showed an interest in photography at age 11, when he took a portrait of his cousin, who died a year later. That “treasure I could hold in my hand,” as he later described it, showed him the power of the medium as a tool of history. He attended St. Augustine High School in the Seventh Ward and began photographing professionally shortly after.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, his work appeared in the Louisiana Weekly, Figaro, Ebony, Essence, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. He exhibited at the 1984 world’s fair’s Afro-American Pavilion, and in 2011 he published a book, In the Blink of an Eye: Photographic Memories of a New Orleans No More, with his wife, Cheron Brylski.

Baquet died at age 56 in 2015, following a battle with colon cancer. Soon after, Brylski approached HNOC about donating his archive. From the outset, it was clear that Baquet’s view of the city, filtered through both his camera and life experiences, would be a wonderful addition to HNOC’s photographic history of New Orleans. The 2016 acquisition was a milestone for HNOC because it represented the institution’s first extended body of work by an African American New Orleans photographer.

The archive spans the late 1970s through the early 2010s and includes work made during the administrations of the first two African American mayors of New Orleans, Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial (1978–86) and Sidney J. Barthelemy (1986–94). Baquet’s inquisitive personality, as well as New Orleans’s relatively small number of photography firms, led to a wide-ranging practice: portraits, advertisements, hard news, stock photography, and his own projects. Consequently, his archive contains thousands of rolls of film, color slides, digital files, and printed photographs—the fruits of a busy and successful commercial practice.

Baquet covered weddings, christenings, political events, neighborhood life and festivals, Mardi Gras, and the face of the city as embodied in its people and architecture. Some of these topics skewed toward Baquet’s personal interests, including daily life in African American neighborhoods.

Baquet was a regular sight on Loyola’s campus, capturing quiet moments of student life as well as official university events. Loyola granted him the Coadjutor Optimus Award, the St. Sebastian Award, and the President’s Medal.  

His work depicted many of the problems facing Black citizens, from crime to substandard housing and limited economic opportunities. Despite their clear-eyed appraisals of social inequities, his photographs also reflected their subjects’ compassion, pride, and tenderness, as well as their maker’s affection.

“You can’t just photograph somebody out the window of your automobile, like a drive-by shooting,” he told Callaloo, speaking about the sensitivity of photographing residents post-Katrina. “You have to get out and introduce yourself and legitimize yourself to a total stranger and try to gain enough of his or her trust to allow the photographer into a very intimate component of his or her life and experience.”

Because of the vast size of Baquet’s archive, HNOC staff elected to catalog the images in groups and digitize contact sheets, available on the public catalog. Individual photographs are being digitized from negatives on a rolling basis. HNOC welcomes help from the public in identifying people in Baquet’s photographs. To submit an ID, fill out the form on this page.