Pableaux Johnson, a New Orleans food writer, photographer and cook who spread the gospel of community by serving bowls of red beans and rice to thousands of people, and who documented the city’s singular Mardi Gras traditions, died there on Sunday. He was 59.
Mr. Johnson’s sister Charlotte Aaron said he was photographing a second-line parade — something he did often — when he experienced cardiac arrest and could not be revived at the hospital.
Mr. Johnson moved to New Orleans in 2001 and quickly became what the local chef Frank Brigtsen called a “joyful fixture” in the city.
“He embraced New Orleans, and it embraced him back because he was so authentic,” Mr. Brigtsen said in an interview.
Plenty of Mr. Johnson’s friendships — essentially everyone he met — began over a bowl of red beans and rice, a traditional Monday meal in New Orleans. He cooked it every week, at first for a small group of friends but soon for pilgrims from all over the country who loved the city’s food and culture.
His rotating group of guests might include not only local musicians, famous chefs and visiting journalists but also a neighbor who needed a meal or a friend with a broken heart.
No phones were allowed, and the menu never varied from red beans and rice and cornbread, with whiskey for dessert. The table was set with a roll of paper towels and a pile of spoons. Guests could bring something to drink but never food.
The restrictions were in part to adhere to the simplicity of a meal traditionally made on Mondays because the city’s cooks were busy with laundry. Extra dishes would just make the whole thing too complicated; Mr. Johnson would rather focus on the conversation.
“One of the things that’s important about that table is it wasn’t the dining table at my grandmother’s house; it was the kitchen table,” Mr. Johnson said in 2017 on the public radio show “The Splendid Table.” “The fancy dining room table didn’t get used every day, but this one did. This was where all the power was.”
The suppers became an important bridge between cultures in the city, said Jessica Harris, a scholar of the foodways of the African diaspora who lives in New Orleans part time and was a regular guest.
“There are so few places in New Orleans where Blacks and whites socialize at home,” Dr. Harris said. “The joy was that the table became a way for him to create community, and that community was one that was sorely needed in New Orleans, where a strange social apartheid exists.”
On occasion, guests would include members of the city’s historic social aid and pleasure clubs, which had been formed as Black benevolent societies to pool resources to cover health care and funerals.
On most Sundays, one of the 40 clubs buys custom outfits, hires a brass band and hosts an elaborate four-hour parade, known as a second line.
Their costumes, music and customs were a fascination for Mr. Johnson, who became a regular presence, wearing Johnny Cash black with a camera slung over his shoulder. He also captured images of the elaborately dressed Black masking Indians, also known as Mardi Gras Indians — an elusive slice of the city’s community traditions created as a way to honor the Indigenous people who helped those who had escaped slavery survive in the Louisiana wilderness.
Mardi Gras Indians can be suspicious of outsiders and don’t let many photographers get close, said Freddye Hill, a retired college dean and documentary photographer who was with Mr. Johnson in his last moments, at the Ladies and Men of Unity second line.
“People trusted him because he didn’t sell their pictures,” she said in an interview. “They respected his work, and they knew that if they needed anything from him, they could call.”
When someone from that community died, Mr. Johnson would show up at the funeral with an enlarged portrait of the person for the family.
In 2016, he created two documentaries about the culture of Black masking Indians: “The Spirit Leads My Needle: The Big Chiefs of Carnival” and “It’s Your Glory: The Big Queens of Carnival.” Some of his images were exhibited at galleries and museums around the country.
Second lines for people who have died, also called memorial processions, are usually reserved for club members, musicians or masking Indians. But one was arranged for Mr. Johnson on Monday, and more are to come this week.
“For him to get that kind of treatment the night after he passed? That’s spine-tingling,” said Katy Reckdahl, a reporter and a friend of Mr. Johnson’s. “That tells you he was an integral part of the city’s cultural community.”
Paul Michael Johnson was born on Jan. 8, 1966, in Trenton, N.J., to Carmelite Hebert Blanco and Philip Johnson. By the time he was 7, his parents had divorced, and his mother, who had grown up in Baton Rouge, moved Paul and his two sisters to New Iberia, La., about 130 miles west of New Orleans. In 1988, he graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, where he studied history, religion and sociology.
His friendships with people in the city’s Latino community contributed to his decision to change his name to Pableaux — Pablo being the Spanish word for Paul, and the “-eaux” honoring his French Cajun roots.
After bouncing between San Francisco, Europe and Oxford, Miss., he landed in Austin, Texas, where he worked as a freelance food writer for publications including The New York Times and started throwing gumbo parties that grew to more than 100 guests.
He later turned his New Orleans Monday dinners into the Red Beans Roadshow, packing his car with ingredients and partnering with chefs in dozens of cities to recreate in their restaurants what he did at home.
During the holidays he would stockpile cheap turkeys in a freezer, which he would turn into gallons of gumbo that he delivered, earning the nickname Gumbo Claus.
He made delightful intimate portraits of most people he met, disarming subjects with a joke or by saying, “Think of me as your Cajun grandma with a beard.” Many parents said his photos of their children were the best they had ever seen.
He wrote four books, including a guidebook to eating in New Orleans that was published just before Hurricane Katrina. He was named one of the top 100 cooks in America by the website Epicurious, and he was the first call many food journalists made when they were traveling to or writing about Louisiana.
In addition to his sister Charlotte, he is survived by another sister, Elaine Johnson; a half brother, Tony Blanco; and his stepsiblings, Joe Blanco, Felicia Searcy and Paul Blanco. His marriage to Ariana French ended in divorce in 2006.
He would also say he is survived by “his people” — the countless friends he made over the decades.
Dr. Harris was one of them.
“He would call and say, ‘I’m just checking on my people. How you doing?’” she said. “People don’t do that anymore, just pick up the phone. But Pableaux did.”
