Even though my New Orleans peeps are always in my thoughts and in my heart, they have really been at the forefront recently. Maybe it’s because I’m preparing for my annual sojourn to my favorite city for the jazz festival and my photo exhibit. But more importantly, to see my dear friends Jesse, Amy, Sean, Art, Lorraine, Miss McKay, Ranord, Marilyn, Camille, Dwight, Chrissy, Gretchen, Bill, Eliza, Alexa, Stella, Harry, Dawn, Lena and I hope the hard-to-catch-up-to Thais.
Besides a much needed opportunity to (over) indulge in the ever-present music scene, laughter and go-cups, I need to look into their eyes, hear what is going on in their lives and witness the city’s recovery. My love for that city goes far beyond its good times.
However, my love pales in comparison to that of photographer David Rae Morris. I parachute in for the good times but David has vigilantly walked it, day in and day out. After the hurricane, he made sure his family was safe, and then he returned to help others and document life after Katrina. He is truly one to be admired.
I asked David to write a blog for me last year – which he did – and I think now is the perfect time to post it. In less than two weeks, over a 100,000 people, including me, will again drop into New Orleans for the good times. We need to be reminded of the bad.
Guest blogger David Rae Morris
John Glenn has graciously invited me to contribute to his blog. I have for years maintained my own website and made updates and added a variety of galleries over the years. However, it has been, at best, less than disciplined. My “Picture of the Week” often becomes the picture of the month until something happens somewhere around town or the country that allows me to tap my archive. John suggested that I talk about my coverage of the second anniversary of Katrina, as well as the past two years I have spent covering the aftermath of the storm. Still it has taken me weeks to get my bearings. Like many of my fellow photographers and journalists in New Orleans, I have covered little other than Katrina since the storm made landfall August 29, 2005.
I have lived in New Orleans since 1994. It is a wonderful place. Rich in tradition and culture, yet at the same time filled with dramatic contradictions. It has great food and great music, and yet abject poverty and social malaise. We are, of course, all familiar with the remarkable images of people being rescued off rooftops and thousands stranded without food or water at the Convention Center and the Superdome. But Katrina has turned out to be so much more. I evacuated with my family two days before the storm. We made it out of town just before the traffic started to get bad, and drove three hours north to Jackson, Mississippi. I have no regrets about evacuating, and I have often wondered how I would have handled the enormity of the event. As it was, I did not return to New Orleans until September 8th, ten days after landfall. The Convention Center and the Superdome had finally been successfully evacuated and the story was shifting to search and rescue. I knew that this was the biggest story of my life and that I had to jump in. I had already spent three days on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but only one day on assignment. It was several days before I even know if my house was okay or not.
When I returned to New Orleans I was not on assignment at all. And I think it gave me the opportunity to truly absorb the magnitude of the tragedy. I was not on deadline, I didn’t have to answer to an editor in New York or Washington, and I was free to feel. And I made some of the memorable images of my life. I found a certain freedom in being unattached. Shooting without expectation or design. The assignments would come later. But in those first days it was not so much that I was finding the images, the images were finding me.
It was four months before I shot my first non-Katrina assignment. I could count on two hands the number I shot in the first year. Everything was Katrina. We lived and breathed it. It was everywhere. You could not, and to some extent, still cannot, go to a party, or out to dinner or an event without almost all of the conversations revolving around Katrina. For two years, I have not only been covering the story, I am part of the story. But when is enough? I’ve made some of the best images of my life, met some amazing and resilient people, and am determined for the city to recover. But I am not the first to say that I would give it all back, if I could somehow make it August 28th, 2005 again, with the promise that we would be spared.
How, then, does one move on? How do you make a break from something that has surrounded and consumed you for two years? I didn’t lose my house; the water stopped a block away. But I know many people who did lose their houses. And living just three blocks from the bridge to the Lower Ninth Ward, I am confronted with the realities of post-Katrina New Orleans on a daily basis. But when is enough? When does a story simply become too much to bear? When do you have to move on? I reached a point of saturation before the first anniversary. I wasn’t going to turn down work, but at the same time I was not going to voluntarily follow another grieving family into the remains of their home. I was not going to photograph more crews gutting houses or more piles of debris. I chose instead to focus on more positive aspects of the story: an 83 year-old man re-building his house so his wife could return from exile, a preacher re-building his church and his congregation in the Lower Ninth Ward. Still there were weeks, even months, when I simply could not engage the story anymore.
Then my neighbor, Dinneral Shavers, the drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band, was shot and killed by a “rival” of his 15 year-old stepson. The city has descended into chaos and lawlessness. The same people who were determined to return and rebuilding the city in the months following the storm, are now all considering leaving. My partner of 20 years took a job on the faculty at a respected university in the
Midwest. She was waking up here with what she called “ugly” thoughts, and driving to work every day across town through some of the devastated neighborhoods. She took our five-year-old daughter with her. I don’t begrudge her for a minute. But I could not let go of the city yet. So for now, I am commuting.
Recently I turned back to a project I was working on before the storm: a series of portraits I took of my late father over a 25-year period. He was a noted writer. He grew up in a small town in Mississippi and ended up as the youngest editor of Harper’s Magazine in 1967. He wrote me scores and scored of letters. The exhibit, Letters From My Father, is finally opening next week at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. I have moved from one emotional minefield to another.
Outsiders either think that we’re still underwater or everything is fine. Neither is true. While a visitor can fly down for a long weekend, stay at an elegant French Quarter hotel, take a carriage ride, have a nice meal at Galatoire’s, K-Paul’s, or Brennan’s, and never know anything happened here. Drive a mile or two out of the Quarter and it becomes a war zone. People are struggling to survive. Many can’t even return. Their houses are in ruin and the government won’t release the money they need to help re-build. People are throwing up their hands and leaving.
Perhaps my days too are numbered. When I leave on trips or to visit my family I feel great relief getting out of the city, as if a great burden has been lifted. When I return, it becomes a struggle to readjust. There is the possibility that I can join my partner in the winter, and teach photojournalism. But will I ever really be able to leave? Because in spite of everything we’ve been through, I still
know what it means to miss New Orleans.
David is now teaching two classes in visual communications at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
