Bridging the Mississippi: Spans Across the Father of Waters
Philip Gould
(Courtesy: Facebook)
Gould, born in 1951 in Massachusetts and raised in San Francisco, California, by a Danish mother and a “hardscrabble” Yankee father, graduated with a degree in photojournalism from San Jose State University. He discovered South Louisiana at age twenty-three when he responded to a job listing in a trade journal for a photographer at The Daily Iberian newspaper in New Iberia. Accepting the position was, according to Gould, “the biggest cultural leap one can make.”
Awed by boudin sausage, accordions (an instrument he eventually learned to play), the Cajun-French language and the “sea of bobbing heads” at the Blue Moon Café in Lafayette, Louisiana, Gould remained in Acadiana, eventually leaving The Daily Iberian and moving to Lafayette, where he embarked on a freelance career of “documentary and architectural photography,” in his words. Even after extended travels to Europe and Mexico, and a brief move to Dallas, Texas, his adopted South Louisiana called him home, serving as a fascinating and infinite source of both personal and professional inspiration.