Lyle Bongé Estate & Archive

Following Lyle's death in late 2009, Paul has begun an aggressive attack on archiving and cataloging Lyle's work. Beginning in the early 1950s and continuing through the late 1980s, Lyle produced thousands of memorable images. Lyle would admit that although his photography is best characterized as non-objective, with landscape & cityscape, and nudes thrown into the mix and comprising a very large part of his catalog of work, that because he was the very first still photographer to aggressively document the horror and bacchanalian extravaganza of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and to do so from 1956 to 1989 without missing a year, that this would be the work for which he would be remembered.

The catalog of Mardi Gras alone comprises some 29 to 35 thousand negatives and is without a doubt the signal most important catalog of Mardi Gras to ever be compiled by one individual, and with one individual's own personal artistic vision.