Being Poor in New Orleans Series

Beginning in 1977, Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez produced a series of half-hour documentaries about New Orleans' challenges called Being Poor in New Orleans. The programs were broadcast on WGNO-TV (Channel 26) and produced under the auspices of NOVAC, the New Orleans Video Access Center.

Presenting some of the first independent TV documentaries made in New Orleans, the series was a pathbreaking look at New Orleans' problems and raised a number of issues about inequality that had not been aired in the city's media at the time.

All three films deal with topics that are still a part of New Orleans' everyday challenges, while presenting a time-capsule of the people and the streets of the city almost forty years ago.