Florestine Perrault Collins

Florestine Perrault was born on the second of November 1895 at New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Arnold Perrault — a New Orleans Creole carpenter — and Marie Cécile Boutté. She was raised in the segregated New Orleans Creole community of the Seventh Ward.

She was apprenticed at fifteen in 1910 to the New Orleans studio of the white portrait photographer Bertrand Hébert — passing as white at the studio for the seven years of the apprenticeship — and completed the apprenticeship in 1917 at the Hébert studio.

She opened the principal Florestine Perrault Studio at 1230 North Claiborne Avenue at New Orleans in 1920 — the principal Black-female-owned portrait studio in the segregated American South. The Perrault Studio operated at the Claiborne Avenue address from 1920 to 1944.

She produced across the twenty-four years at the Claiborne Avenue studio the principal portrait record of the New Orleans Creole and African American middle-class community of the segregation period — including the principal portraits of the Creole social events, the New Orleans Black graduating classes, and the Seventh Ward Catholic confirmations.

She was the principal Black female portraitist of the Jim Crow segregated American South of the 1920s and 1930s — at a time when the principal southern American studio photography was overwhelmingly white-owned and male-operated.

She relocated the studio to Los Angeles, California in 1944 — and continued the principal portrait practice at Los Angeles through 1949.

She retired from the principal portrait practice in 1949 and lived in retirement at Los Angeles.

Her principal portrait collection — approximately five thousand surviving negatives and prints of the New Orleans Black Creole community of the 1920s through 1940s — was donated by her family to the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in 1980.

She died at Los Angeles on the eleventh of August 1988 of natural causes, at ninety-two.

She is honored here as the principal Black female studio photographer of the segregated American South.