jason kerzinski

After spending a year away, I’ve recently returned to New Orleans with a different sense of place. I spent the first stretch of 2025 in De Pere, Wisconsin, living with my mom and working briefly as a postal worker. The days there were quiet and structured—held together by routine, long walks, time at the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary, and a stillness I hadn’t felt in years.

After about six months, I moved to Tulsa to stay with a friend, carrying with me a restlessness, a feeling of being in transition—between homes, between directions, between versions of myself.

When I finally came back to New Orleans, the first thing that surfaced wasn’t an image but a poem. It arrived almost on its own, shaped by the months of drifting, returning, and relearning how to move through this city again. The poem felt like a pressure valve opening—an early articulation of everything I couldn’t yet say in any other form.

In a way, it became a map: a small, intuitive record of where I was emotionally and creatively at that moment of return. And it’s from that poem, “I’m back to you” that I’m beginning a new body of photography and poems. The poem is the threshold I’m stepping through, the first marker in a longer process of seeing what’s changed in me, and what the city reflects back.

Everything that comes next will grow out of the tone and texture of those initial words. This project starts with poems, and with the recognition that returning is not a single moment but an unfolding—slow, subtle, and still in motion. I will periodically add and subtract poems and photo from this page as this body of work ebbs and flows.

I’m back to you

The magnolia smells of

The real earth

Is a well known fact

To those that

Walk by magnolias

Subtle sent

Now lodged between

Our petals

Excavations to keep

Us full of nature's vivid lives

I locked away in