Of Katrina’s Wake

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 destroying large tracts of infrastructure and woodland along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts and causing damage as far as one hundred miles inland.  As time progressed and the situation along the Gulf Coast worsened, it became apparent that the already horrific landscape was further burdened by a political infrastructure gone awry.

Those calamitous first few days drew photographers from around the globe, representing more printed and e-publications that can be counted. Neither individually nor collectively, though, can photographers, via their images, encapsulate the extant devastation unleashed upon New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The unnatural disaster of Hurricane Katrina – the failure of governmental and social systems the public is reliant upon in catastrophes – does not easily lend itself to visualization. Photographs can show the children of New Orleans to this day playing in ramshackle streets, littered with the rubble of their lives before Katrina, but photographs alone cannot counter the effacement of responsibility to a collective political engagement with the poverty and racism laid bare by Hurricane Katrina.

Above all else, photography is a medium of interpretive expression. In New Orleans and the Gulf Coast – just as in past calamities and injustices – documentary photojournalism can, when appropriately contextualized, be the catalyst for positive peace and recuperative social action. Catastrophes, disasters, and wars – not unlike our lives in our memories – have a way of being reduced to instantaneity or encapsulating fragments so as to ease the transference of memory. As Katrina is written into history, the same shall happen to this tale. What documentary photojournalism can provide now is not just the pieces by which to compile that history, but the continued reminder and occasional spark that, though the spectacle has passed and Hurricane Katrina has long since subsided, the Gulf Coast and New Orleans still need help.

Denise Ofelia Mangen
NYC, Spring 2007