James Edmunds, born in New Iberia, has been an English teacher, photographer, writer, editor, photo editor, radio announcer and more. He has written for Newsweek, Louisiana Life, The Dallas Times-Herald, Figaro, Gris-Gris and others. In 1980, he and a partner founded The Times of Acadiana, where Edmunds served as the editor for the first five years and associate publisher for three years.
Since 1977, he has been involved in a range of performing arts and theatrical production projects. From 1998 through 2010, he served variously as board member, treasurer, general manager and consulting manager for the Performing Arts Society of Acadiana.
Today, Edmunds focuses on photography and creating short films, which have been exhibited in various film festivals around the United States. Some of his films include “I know what you remember” and “The Taste of Summer.” His current project is a short film about his relative Walter Chapman, a concert pianist who was one of the first people to make sound recordings, aimed for completion in 2027.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
James Edmunds, born in New Iberia, has been an English teacher, photographer, writer, editor, photo editor, radio announcer and more.
PROVIDED PHOTO
In our text exchange before this interview, you told me that you weren’t sure if you were creating many solutions. Through working on this section, I’ve found that it’s the “normal” people who have the most interesting stories. From your time as a reporter and editor, how have you seen ordinary people make a difference in Acadiana?
In Acadiana, just like any place when someone has a real strong devotion to something they think is important and valuable to others, those people are a fabulous asset to a community.
Most of us, we’re just getting through the day. You’ve got to feed yourself, have a roof over your head and so on. We’re legitimately preoccupied with doing all those things, but our lives are brightened tremendously by people who are giving us things that take us to another level of enjoyment and engagement in life.
I’m a real arts guy, and I’ve worked in the arts community a lot. The people who do that, their energy is just tremendous.
Jackie Lyle and I have worked together a lot. We’re co-conspirators on any number of projects over the decades, and she has a fierce energy to this devotion to the idea that all people should have access to a wide range of the arts
Acadiana — and Louisiana — is a place that brims with culture. Why is it important to bring outside culture to Acadiana?
Members of the marching band Mucca Pazza perform as Festival International de Louisiane continues on Saturday, April 26, 2025, in downtown Lafayette.
STAFF PHOTO BY BRAD BOWIE
It’s new energy. Anybody who’s a dancer benefits by seeing great dancers. Anybody who is a musician benefits from hearing great musicians.
One of the more unusual aspects here is that you can hear great musicians and see great dancers among your local folks. We have an unusually high local stock of that.
When we were hiring someone to work at The Times of Acadiana, we were interviewing this guy from Ohio. We took him out to Mulate’s in Breaux Bridge. A local band was there, and he said, “This is your local music?”
I said, “Yeah, we have indigenous music that’s really rich and vibrant. What about in Ohio?”
He said, “Well, Bruce Springsteen’s from Ohio.”
We have a strong cultural art scene. Because of that, you grow up knowing that you can go out for dinner and then hear a band playing music. It’s not just something from the jukebox. It’s music that’s about something.
If you grow up engaged in the arts, you grow up knowing that you’ve been exposed to art that’s about something, and it comes from somewhere, and it’s going somewhere.
A still shot from “The Taste of Summer,” a film by James Edmunds.
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You mentioned Jackie Lyle, who works with the Performing Arts Society of Acadiana. Do you still work with the group?
No, I’m seriously trying to be quiet in my later years. But Jackie and I worked — she’s got more energy than I ever had. I occasionally chat with her about things, because we’ve worked as cross sounding boards for each other.
I’m sort of like an old emeritus guy, like the person in the movies who’s living alone in the mountains now but used to be a spy.
What does being quiet entail for you?
I like to take pictures, so I’ve been doing a lot of photography. At this latter stage of life, I do show films at film festivals. My area of interest is composition. I like the way you can frame up a tableau and show it and so on and so forth.
The films I make, I’ve actually gotten a few cinematography awards for the films — even though they’re not about, necessarily, highly cinematic topics. I’m very careful about composition of the scene.
A poster from “I know what you remember,” a film by James Edmunds.
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Film and photography requires one to be able to spot beauty. How do you find beauty in a place that you’ve been in for so long?
That’s what beauty is. You continue to see the beauty unfolding. Over the years, in terms of beauty and seeing it and photographing it and then trying to see it when filming, I’ve started uplifting a smaller and smaller frame of reference.
Maybe that’s just a part of getting older. When you’re young, you want to show it all. You want to show the dramatic scene. A big part of photography, especially photojournalism, is showing it pretty. Let’s say I’m at Cajun Country Mardi Gras, and I need to show the guy on the horse catching the beer can with a piece of boudin in his other hand.
After you’ve captured that scene, it will continue to inspire many other photographers. Instead of running out of things, you’re free to find new things and free to be even more idiosyncratic about what it is you look for.
You mentioned the music in Louisiana being meaningful and appreciated. That tends to create this strong sense of place — something that Acadiana has. Do you think a strong sense of place changes how people treat one another in a community?
I think that’s absolutely true. Another thing that happens is you really appreciate what you have here when you see it differently. It’s an extremely beautiful place if you like mosquitoes.
We’re going next week to Arizona. It’s almost this radically different place to be. You’re sort of programmed to think there are rewards in seeing things, so you go to a completely different environment. The opposite of that is true, too. It can make you sad to see characterless environments — from the physical beauty to the food. You have the expectation that these things are enriching, engaging and rewarding.
We have a lot of friends from the Midwest, and they just marvel at your average place to go eat lunch down here.
All of the richness here elevates our expectations, and it elevates what we demand. That’s why I think so many people who are in the arts — who move from south Louisiana and go to places like New York and L.A. — the reason they do so well is because their level of expectation about how good something should be starts at a base level of really high.
