I’ve been grappling over how to talk about Katrina + 5. Should I say anything at all? Something contrived but candid? Write an epitaph or poem in perfect iambic pentameter? I don’t know. But honestly, at this point I don’t want to say anything or hear anything about it. I don’t want to watch TV specials or Spike Lee’s new sequel or read another New York Times article or some obligatory anniversary piece by some faraway paper. All I want to do is look at the photographs—lots of photographs.
I read an article last week in which a journalist wrote that during a recent trip to New Orleans he had to seek out examples of Katrina, as everything was restored and vibrant again. And while this observation seems a bit inaccurate, it’s kind of true. When folks come to visit they often assume Katrina wasn’t as bad as it seemed. But it was. And it still is. All you have to do is pick up a copy of the Times-Picayune. Or seek out one of the haunting photographs taken in the storm’s aftermath.
Around this time last summer I attended a large event at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Bored with chit-chatting, I sneaked off to explore the museum’s halls and absorb art in solitude. It was there that I chanced upon the riveting exhibit Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography, which starkly showcased the inevitable stages of life through the themes of love, wellness, children and family, caregiving, aging, remembering, war and disaster. I’d never before been so moved by a photography exhibit. I spent an entire hour in the adjoining exhibit rooms, carefully scanning each face, each angle, each mood, each meaning. And when I got to the disaster section, I welled up at the most disturbing Hurricane Katrina photograph I’d ever seen. The focal point of the photo was a bedroom with a king-size bed caked in layers of mold, soot and debris. It looked as if a set designer had painted layers of black, green and gray felt throughout and then staged the room for a grotesque art show. It was something you’d expect to see in a movie, not real life.
This past weekend, I set out to find that photo. I didn’t know the title or the photographer and it seemed a bit unrealistic to think that I’d find it. But I did. After several bookstores and hours of poring over what seemed like thousands of images, I found it in Robert Polidori’s book, After the Flood. It’s called 6328 Miro Street. Polidori came under a lot of fire for his post-Katrina photos. Some said they were too intrusive and opportunistic. But I disagree.
Yes, there’s an undeniable degree of privacy invasion and sacrilege exacted on the subjects (often people) of disaster photography. Sometimes they don’t give permission or don’t know their faces will become symbols of political struggles and natural catastrophes. But their struggles and sense of loss—their ultimate truth is conveyed through the photograph. And the photograph describes the rawness of their “truth” better than any journalist, poet laureate or blogger ever could.
Consider what’s been said of Walker Evans’ theory of photography:“The facts of our homes and times, shown surgically, without the intrusion of the poet’s or painter’s comment or necessary distortion, are the unique contemporary field of the photographer, whether in static print or moving film. It is for him to fix and to show the whole aspect of our society, the sober portrait of its stratifications, their backgrounds and embattled contrasts. It is the camera today that reveals our disasters and our claims to divinity, doing what painting and poetry used to do and, we can only hope, will do again.”
Or consider what Walter Benjamin once said of Atget’s Parisian photographs, they “become standard evidence for historical occurrences and acquire a hidden political significance.” This theory applies to iconic photographs of the past century, too. Photographs such as Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl or Tom Stoddart’s Food Theft or the more obscure though no less powerful photo by David Creedon, Green Kitchen — taken in the deserted area of West Cork, Ireland. Eerily enough, Green Kitchen resembles 6328 North Miro a great deal. Creedon says of his photo, “I wanted to commemorate those people; the isolation, loneliness and continuing hardships that they suffered.”
In fact, a sense of profound loss and agony streams, almost universally, through all these images. It’s the common bond. Such photography, as Helmut Gernsheim puts it, allows us to become “the eyewitnesses of the humanity and inhumanity of mankind.” They document, in high relief, what we should never forget. Moments in history: the Jim Crow era, the Holocaust, the war in Afghanistan, 9-11, the Haitian earthquake, Nagasaki.
The same can be said of the hundreds of Katrina pictorial essays, coffee table books, insurance photos and exhibits. They continue to remind and haunt us, even as personal accounts become distant memories and articles, literary memorials. And as anniversaries pass and people move on or rebuild or pass away and neighborhoods grow and shrink and buildings rise and fall and tourists come and go, those haunting photographs from 2005 remain, forever.
OK, so I’ve succeeded in doing just what I said I wouldn’t do. This is my rather reductionist way of commemorating Katrina + 5. But it feels appropriate, especially since I’m technically still new to New Orleans. Katrina’s legacy and lessons live on, indeed. And I’ll never forget. We will never forget.
