4 years in the making, this is an unprecedented look at more than 120 bars inside and outside (literally) of Orleans Parish. Local Spirit : Neighborhood Bars of Orleans Parish By Rick Dobbs & Ken Murphy Rick Dobbs is the award winning creative director of UNREAL, a multi-disciplinary creative studio based out of New Orleans with clients world wide. Rick was previously art director at MGM-MIRAGE's Beau Rivage Resort in Biloxi, Mississippi, and at XDesign in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With over 15 years of advertising and design experience, Rick is zealous about creating clean, effective design that tells a story and starts a conversation. The idea for Local Spirit: Neighborhood Bars of Orleans Parish has absorbed Rick for a long time, and it's a beautiful homage to the spirit of a city he loves. Ken Murphy was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1954, but has spent most of his life in Bay St. Louis, his mother’s hometown. In 1971, Murphy, a 17-year-old high school dropout, joined the Army together with his brother Ray, and was assigned to Korea and then Germany. While serving there as a tank commander, he lost his right index finger in a war game accident, and was reassigned to an Army photo shop. After leaving the service in 1979, he continued working in photography and in 1986 received his degree in Documentary & Editorial Photographic Illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He returned to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to work as a commercial/art photographer, and in 2001 released his first book, My South Coast Home: Photographs of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The book documented much of what was lost in Hurricane Katrina, which claimed Murphy’s home, his Bay St. Louis restaurant Dan B.’s, and the vast majority of his photographic archive. Murphy escaped from the storm with the negatives for My South Coast Home and his next photography book, Mississippi, which was published in 2007 and which Oxford’s Square Books called “the best (coffee table) book ever done about the state of Mississippi.” In 2006, he received the MAC Katrina Art Business Grant, and in 2007 a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Details : 14” x 10”, 196 page coffee table photography book.
