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Edward Richards |
Photography is not my day job. I teach at the LSU Law
School. I did photography back in high school in the 1960s. Those were
mainly football pictures with a 4x5 Graphic and roll back. I kept
shooting, but professional and family obligations keep my work to
personal and family topics, and moves kept me from setting up a
darkroom. Digital let me get back into printing but I found that while
digital was great for family pictures and vacation shots, I really
wanted to get back to serious black and white work. About 18 months
ago I put together a hybrid system, based around a 1950s Linhof
Technika 4x5, some modern lenses, a scanner, and a good large format
digital printer. I shoot 4x5 black and white film (Tmax 100), process
it myself, then scan it and work from the digital files. About the
time that I had my 4x5 technique up to speed again, Katrina came
along.
Baton Rouge, where I live, is about 70 miles north and west of New
Orleans, on the Mississippi River. We are well away from the coast, so
storm surge and flooding are not issues for us, although we did
sustain some limited damage from both Katrina and Rita. As the seat of
the state government and the flagship state university - LSU - and the
closest major city to New Orleans still standing, we were the center
for emergency relief and for refugees. For a few weeks, we probably
had 200,000 extra people in a metro area of about 450,000. These
included refugees and aid workers. We were all involved in various
ways. My wife, a physician, helped a shelter, then organized
vaccination services through her employer. All of the physicians saw
huge numbers of patients from New Orleans. The LSU law school, where I
teach, took in 160 students from the New Orleans law schools that were
forced to close.
My own legal work includes disaster preparation and response, as well
as public heath. (I do some work with the CDC, Homeland Security, and
the Department of Justice.) Katrina immediately posed many
professional issues for me, such as levee law, evacuations, marshal
law, and other issues related to the Katrina refugee crisis.
While I was busy in Baton Rouge, I kept I close watch on Katrina
coverage in the news and in the photography community. I saw two
trends: a lot of good news photography and photojournalism focusing on
the human side; and serious photographers from out of the area, such
as Chris Jordan, who were doing good work in New Orleans, but who, not
being familiar with the region, did not venture far out of New
Orleans.
As things settled down in Baton Rouge, and security was relaxed on the
flooded areas, which was about two months after the storm, I started
systematically exploring the entire region affected by Katrina, from
Ocean Spring, Mississippi, which is just east of Biloxi, to Grand
Isle, Louisiana, which is west and south of New Orleans. What I saw
was both amazing and frightening. I started documenting the damage
with my 4x5, but from the perspective of a fine art photographer
rather than a photojournalist. I soon realized that there was a nexus
between my professional work and my photography: documenting the
effect on the built environment was a great way to get people to
understand the long-term problems that most emergency planning
ignores.
Once I saw what the pictures looked like -- and they are a lot more
striking as 18" x 24" or larger prints than they are on my
Web site
-- I realized that this project could stand on its own as fine art
photography without having to be tied to Katrina. This encouraged me
to continue my trips, and to push in the remote corners of Louisiana
that most folks do not visit. For example, there is marshland that
extends more than 50 miles east of New Orleans into the Gulf of
Mexico. Completely covered by more than 15 feet of water, this is St.
Bernard Parish, home to about 30,000 people. This is where I took the
picture of the refrigerator 12 feet up in a tree, for example. It is
also serious marsh grass area, where you are hiking in grass head
high, over unstable mats of debris, keeping your eye out for gators
and snakes.
The most severe damage is on the Mississippi side of the Mississippi
Louisiana border, on the east side of where the eye of the storm made
landfall, and in St. Bernard Parish, which was completely flooded.
This is not to down play the damage of the flooding in New Orleans,
but the New Orleans flooding was gradual. New Orleans did not suffer
from the direct storm surge that put more than 20 feet of raging water
into some areas, carrying away the land itself. Fortunately, these
areas were much less populated, so while the damage was complete, it
affected far fewer people than in New Orleans where standing water
caused most of the damage. The exceptions, which I have documented,
were the places in New Orleans next to canal breaks, which were swept
clean for several blocks.
I continued to travel and take pictures, revisiting several areas such
as the 9th Ward in New Orleans as I found more things to shoot, and to
get better weather to reshoot some locations. My most recent shots
were just a couple of weeks ago, but I think I am probably done with
the shooting. I am still working images through Photoshop, and
reprocessing the first ones I shot. I try going back to every image a
month or more later and to see if I can do a better job with a fresh
eye. There are currently about 136 images on my Web site, and I expect
to add a few more as I finish processing the last of the scans. The
Web site displays both serious fine art images and images that are
striking documentation, but not as strong photographically because of
adverse weather or physical access problems which limited my ability
to get an effective camera position.
View the 'Katrina: Another
View' photo gallery
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