Hurricane Katrina

Many months ago, when I first heard of Beasts of the Southern Wild and knew absolutely nothing about it, I wondered what type of an animal it could possibly be; the title so completely engaged my imagination.

An exhibition of photographs from three series, exploring absence, decomposition and dislocation. Shot in Cape Town and New Orleans, subjects vary from migrants in their intimate spaces, empty beds, and ruined houses.

Aric Mayer discusses the problems and possibilities in photographing New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in this audio slideshow. Aric was the lead photographer covering the storm for The Wall Street Journal.

Filmmaker Taylor delves into Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, where the preconceptions of human nature are exposed and the triumphs of civil society are extolled.

It’s a relatively limited type of adjective that clings to recent abstract painting: intricate, quiet, lyrical, seductive, mysterious, atmospheric.

“What we are looking at in these museum restorations is the society’s superego, what a society thinks of itself, and how it thinks it should be seen by itself. This is what individuals do to a room. Again this same theme. It’s the exteriorization of the soul life or of personal values.”

“All I want is to see where I’m going next.”
—Amy Hempel, Tumble Home

I’ve lived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans for six years, and I might live here the rest of my life. 

HOMECOMING. There’s something so elegiac about this trip to New Orleans. Traveling alone, to my childhood home, a home recently shattered and in ruins. I’ve been feeling ill and out of sorts. I am underslept. My head and back hurt. My stomach is sour. I cannot stop the thought, morbid, that I am returning home to die.

Mom was winning the argument; it was true that no house had ever been lost to a hurricane in our neighborhood in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie.