life:

Relatively early on in its remarkable, decades-long run as a weekly magazine, LIFE turned its eye toward always-enticing, ever-vivid New Orleans and that great city’s signature, defining event: Mardi Gras. In February, 1938, editors sent photographer William Vandivert (later a charter member of Magnum) to the Big Easy to chronicle the carnival — and to show LIFE’s readers how one American city, more Caribbean than Southern in so many ways, maintained a centuries-old tradition of refined debauchery and plain, unalloyed fun in the midst of the Great Depression.

But Bill Vandivert was in New Orleans for more than a few days and nights in the late winter of 1938, and he made hundreds of photographs — far more interesting photographs, it turns out, than those that ran in the magazine…

Feast your eyes — Unpublished Photos: Mardi Gras, 1938

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    Gras photos from 1938. LIFE magazine shares...unpublished photos from depression-era

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