Absence & Memory in the Lower 9th Ward & St. Bernard Parish
I shot these images in January of 2015 on 35mm Portra 400 color film with a Canon AE1. It was my first time in New Orleans, so as an outsider it seemed appropriate to use a consumer-grade tourist camera. I knew very little about the Gulf besides that it was still recovering, or rather, in a perpetual state of recovery. My pedestrian understanding of NOLA had been largely constructed through remotely consuming news footage and press photographs. Images of the Superdome collapsing and of people stranded on the rooftops of flooded homes still haunted me, despite the fact it had been ten years since Katrina. I didn’t have to read Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” or watch Spike Lee’s “When The Levees Broke” (2006) to know that I didn’t want to further exploit an already misrepresented community through my photographs. When I arrived to Arabi (St. Bernard Parish), I was far more moved by the area’s empty lots than its still quarantined homes. I would soon learn that only about one-third of the area’s population had returned since Katrina. I was intrigued by how these spaces were so banal, yet such blatant indicators of both a traumatic past and uncertain future. So I set out looking for such non-spaces and found that their lived histories produced an indescribable aura. When I returned to Ithaca and received my film in the mail, the negatives looked properly exposed. However, upon scanning I realized something had gone wrong. Every image had a ghostly base exposure that indicated there was either a light leak in the camera or the TSA’s X-ray had damaged the film. The warm tones of the Kodak Portra 400 were irreversibly damaged. The irony if the situation took a while to set in. My negatives, like the places they captured, were marked by something that was unperceivable to the human eye yet also undeniably present. According to Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish word “hüzün” describes a communal (as opposed to individual) melancholy that is both a feeling of spiritual loss and a hopeful way of seeing the future. I believe these photographs are evidentiary of New Orleans’ hüzün.