SOUTHERLY GOLD is an ensemble of four female photographers who all live in and are inspired by the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. AUBREY EDWARDS, ARIYA MARTIN, AKASHA RABUT and ELENA RICCI are educators and travelers, artists and professionals. A desire to combine their diverse drive for the photographic medium led them to create this collective to open a dialogue with other women within their field.

Specifically for RADIUS. magazine, each member of Southerly Gold has contributed 5 photographs reflecting elements of the Southern landscape that influence and stimulate their daily creative lives. Whether it's a lone oak tree near the banks of the Mississippi River, or a blighted block of buildings that have yet to be repaired from Katrina, the city of New Orleans is teeming with contradiction and culture.

A complicated city with an even more complicated past of race relations and human exploitation, in many ways it's a country of its own, far removed from the rest of the United States. It's dangerous, it's dirty, it's a swamp. Photographing in the city not only involves one's subjects, but the chugging of passing tugboats, the undulation of the river's waves, the calls of Bonaparte's gulls, the smell of cypress bargeboard, and the flight of Great Blue Herons. To live in New Orleans you must take the good with the bad. That good includes a beautiful community of contemporary artists living together in a broken American city, creating their respective work, and allowing the landscape to inspire them.