Photographing the Ninth Ward

I drove into the Ninth Ward a year and a half after Katrina left it in ruins. Friends of mine who had already been there told me the devastation was "unbelievable." I wondered what that meant -- unbelievable.

My friends were wrong.

The Ninth Ward, in its ruin, was believable, but only in the way certain dreams are believable -- post-World-War-III dreams. Miles and miles of empty houses. No voices, no cars -- an eerie silence except for the distant rumble of dump trucks, the occasional crunching of wood. Now and then a darkened limo, or a Katrina tour bus, would drive through. The initial documentary Gold Rush -- photography inspired by overturned houses, cars in trees, and mountains of debris -- was plainly over. Dramatic spectacle had given way to pervasive loss -- a condition far less tangible, and difficult to photograph. I'm not sure what I felt about what I saw. Disbelief? To be honest, I wasn't able to grasp the disaster. It was too large to be emotionally comprehended, especially by someone who doesn't live there.

St. Rose Missionary Baptist Church

And then, despite my original intentions not to, I began to take photographs -- photographs that reminded me not so much of the New York photographs I took in the early 1970s but of the fundamental reasons why I even became a photographer. In those early years I'd walk around the city for days (as I imagined Cartier-Bresson had walked around Paris) searching for something to photograph -- a person, a dog, a store window, a movie marquee, anything that might open up and reveal an idea about life in New York City. One afternoon, however, as I watched a wrecking ball punch holes in a building I had admired only the week before, the thought crossed my mind that whole sections of the city -- particularly the parts with a distinct cultural identity -- were beginning to disappear. This image of the disappearing city stayed with me, and, almost immediately, I began to photograph everything I considered imperiled -- seltzer bottles stacked high in old wooden crates, Ukrainian men playing backgammon in Tompkins Square, a three-masted model of a ship in the dusty window of an Italian seamen's club in Little Italy. I'm glad I took those photographs. The parts of the city I intended to fix in memory have largely disappeared. And since that time, for more than 30 years, using photography as a means to memorialize loss has served as the wellspring of my work.

Church of the Living God

By the time I arrived in the Ninth Ward in the winter of 2007, a large part of the neighborhood had already disappeared, and the rest was in danger of being hauled away. I began to photograph those things that still remained: beautiful wrought-iron railings, a church organ covered in cracked silt, and, oddly enough, a Sunday School bulletin board full of thumbtacks. I wanted the photographs to say "See, this was here, and that was there." For a photographer, that seemed a simple enough and legitimate task. After all, the moment we allow ourselves to forget the intimate details of a Somewhere, Donald Trump and his friends, waiting in the wings, will happily make an entrance and build us a new and improved Nowhere -- monolithic, impersonal, luxurious, and white. The Ninth Ward was disappearing, it seemed to me, not only because of Katrina, but because of a long-standing indifference to the poor, an indifference now transforming itself into a mercilessly strategic land-grab.

Louis Armstrong School

Photographs, though, not only remember, they register surprise. And what surprised me most about the Ninth Ward were the left-over particulars of a multi-layered human geography. What did I expect to find there? The media invariably headline poverty and crime, but those words, chanted like a mantra, don't reveal or illuminate anything; they merely divert us from the deeper problem of American racism. In fact what I found and what I photographed wasn't simply the remnants of a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood now demolished by a hurricane, but the vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity, and where religious faith found expression on every block. From my perspective, the floodwaters had washed away not only bricks and mortar, but also the toxic stereotypes that separate us from each other. What was left, in other words, was the vanishing common ground, and it is this familiar terrain that I have photographed.

For more of John's photography, visit www.johnrosenthal.com.

Comments

[j70460]

What is wrong with you who sit back and criticize this region? Can you take the ideological log out of your eye for a minute and find your humanity?
I'm not poor or black. Katrina hit the entire region, not just the photogenic lower 9th Ward. It is hard to understand how difficult it is to "come back" when the infrastructure is destroyed.
Yea, but it's been years, you say. You have no idea how difficult it is to swallow that. Nobody is more astounded at the lack of progress than we are. We don't need scolding from you back-seat drivers. How about you coming down here and showing us what we are doing wrong, maybe all we need is a little healthy supervision.

[websmith]

I thought this was going to be about the White House.

In a cruel way, New Orleans has been presented with a real opportunity. What once was, as one writer put it, welfare junction could be rebuilt into a symbol of success. You begin by enticing industry with tax breaks and maybe free rent for a year and graduated rent increases afterwards. Just a few prefab buildings will get it started. Then you contact the people who used to live there and ask them if they want jobs and real estate is suddenly in demand. The rest takes care of its self.

What should the ninth ward become? Electric Car valley? Alternative Fuel Valley? Prefab Valley? Electric boats? There are many dreams looking for a home and the rent is low and the labor is cheap. "What was once an area of crime and poverty has now turned into one of the most successful areas in the nation built by its own technology."

As another writer put it, stop with the whining, poor is me, how terrible it is, and how sorry you feel for everyone spiel and get to work. Don't say it can't be done.

[shuaib]

Not all cities and towns can be 'rebuilt'. In the case of New Orleans, there is a high risk of a hurricane hitting the region again. Sometimes, municipalities build more to attract more people who will eventually become residents. But in this case, they're not changing the landscape, or introducing certain laws, like no-smoking anywhere, no polluting cars, building many bicycle lanes, or no fast-food restaurants. They're thinking of rebuilding from the groud-up and before they do so, they have to ask themselves if this is a good area to do so.

Despite the danger of living in that region (due to hurricanes), I still think that people will eventually someday rehabilitate and live in that area. A good example is California where people flock to the shore-sides despite land-slides every year that kill many.

[Sciguy]

Wow.

Please post more of those photographs on HuffPost. We need to be reminded.

Thank you.

[marlin336w]

This article is about New Orleans right? Where does the ninth ward and "vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity" come together? The ninth ward was and always has been welfare city central in New Orleans.
You want to know what you are seeing? The aftermath of 60 years of government handouts. Utter failure not because of a lack of money, but because the people lost the ability to do anything except wait on government to provide for them.
I was there in the aftermath. I saw the people who just whined and cried, wihtout doing anything to help themselves. I have no pity for them or the liberal politicans who made this happen.
I grew up in GALVESTON, TEXAS. Hurricanes came and went. I lived through Hugo in South Carolina. In no other place have I seen so many people who held out their hands crying "SAVE ME, SAVE ME!" while not doing ANYTHING for themselves.
Instead of begging for government handouts after the hurricanes left, where I was raised and in SC, we saved ourselves. But then we weren't the Welfare Queen City, we were hard working AMERICANS WHO GOT IT BACK TOGETHER, we were TEXANs and Southern hard working people.
Tell me again, exactly what part of New Orleans is, or ever was, a home to the "vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity" again?????
I am disgusted with the whiners, especially after more than 3 years....

[Cybershaman]

Thank you for showing us exactly what kind of compassion we can all expect with "conservatives' in power. America, where the only real freedom is the freedom to die, oh wait we cannot even choose to die with dignity in this country!
So you "got it back together" when your community was hit by bad weather. That probably has nothing to do with how much disposable income your community has. The financial ability to have, and keep, homeowners insurance probably also has nothing to do with it either.
Those of us who predicted the land grab in New Orleans, understood the dispicable nature of many who came to 'help'. I knew New Orleans was going to be flooded years before it happened. I watched a Nova on it a decade ago and they predicted exactly what happened so don't try to con me into believing this was all just an 'accident'. The neglect of our infrastructure, in order to buy votes with tax breaks, has brought us to the predictable end point.
New Orleans was a jewel in America's crown. It has been pried out and pawned to pay for our addiction to oil. Your contempt for people who struggle to survive in a system that is designed to exploit them is typical for those who make themselves feel superior by making others feel inferior, nothing more. It's amazing that some people only believe in evolutionary concepts like 'survival of the fittest' when it suits your purposes for self-worship.

[cmbaldwin]

This IS unbelievable and so sad. I just don't understand the priorities of this country. We can't finance education, we can't rebuild a community, we can't repair our infrastructure, but we can dive deeper into debt by financing an occupation in another country... how pathetic.

[TheLar]

Are you sure they're not pictures from Baghdad? I'm getting my cities destroyed by Bush confused.

[terryb]

Thank you, I felt your heart.

[LuckyBlessed]

Heartbreaking.

[saami]

I have seen the ninth ward and other areas of New Orleans now abandoned due to Katrina. Where are our compassionate conservatives? All those good Christian Republicans who despise government helping others because faith based groups can do it, please tell me why these people are abandoned? This is a lasting shame on all of us. These are our fellow Americans who suffered and continue to suffer.

[Swift2]

Of course, there are the ideological reasons not to devote sufficient money to the New Orleans effort -- and outright political scheming too, like the effort to turn Louisiana reliably red by emptying the liberal city -- but there's a deeper problem here. New Orleans exists where it does because of the Mississippi, and the levee system doesn't seem capable of doing much but delaying the apocalypse. What needs to be done is to preserve the swamps south of the city, and the building of levees 100 feet tall and 100 feet wide would only hasten the sinking of the city and the horror of the final collapse. Does anyone have a workable way to preserve the ecosystem of the Mississippi? Should the river be allowed to jump its banks, as it's been trying to for quite a while? We have a scientific problem here, that overwhelms the understandable compulsion to just build up higher levees and wait for global warming to bring the Categorty 6 hurricane that levels it all. (Dramatic exaggerations just to emphasize the point.)

[nexus1961]

Think N.O.was the end of this?
wait a year or 2 when San Francisco, L.A., ALL seacoast cities start losing land
as the sea level rises.....
Think it won't happen?
Go buy a beach-front house if you're so sure.

[JustMyWords]

Unfortunately, you can't really do both - preserving the ecosystem of the Mississippi requires something very different than what would be required to rebuild many parts of New Orleans. The levee system that is part of the New Orleans solution is part of the Mississippi's problem. What we have done with the levee system is destroy the cycle that preserved the area - the regular floods that deposited new soil and kept the area from sinking. And that's one reason why there was comparatively less damage in the areas like the old French Quarter than in "modern" areas - those structures were built with the idea in mind that the river is going to flood every year. You build things up off the ground and plan for the water to run through the lower floor. Yeah, it makes a mess. Yeah, the port activity is disrupted here and there. But it sure looks better than wiping out an entire city....

[yaelbelle]

Thank you so much for this post. Sometimes I think that Katrina has been forgotten. As all the hooplah goes on and on in the media, I wonder, where is New Orleans? How can this national disaster be swept aside? Does no one wonder what has happened? I was shocked that all the "nominees" didn't attend the Black State of the Union, simply, if nothing else, to support the struggling city it was hosted in. There are no Americans in any worse conditions than the worst of the Katrina survivors. This would not be allowed in America. No in L.A. Not in NYC. But it is. One of the oldest and most distinct cultures in America, swoosh...
A forgotten land. A forgotten people.

[oracle99]

Good post ...too bad folks in Washington don't think NOL is important. Why .....because there is no place to make money. After all it was only a poor area. ...and we know how they feel about them. Maybe the ninth ward could have been rebuilt if millions weren't being spent over in Iraq.

[GoCards1978]

Haunting photographs...Kanye West was right. The most pitiful part is that Shrub's feelings about the have-nots in our society are ignored by most people.

[Jude2004]

Wow.

[KMan1]

Great post, thanks for sharing.

[miles120]

John, I really like the St. Rose image. Are you familiar with Debbie Fleming Caffery? She is a friend of mine from the Lafayette area that went into the Ninth Ward just after Katrina. Her website is http://www.debbieflemingcaffery.com/ .

[johnlrosenthal]

I wasn't, until you kindly sent me to her website. Wonderful portraits, wonderful photographs. Thank you.