Haunting photo book shows New Orleans as ghost town

Sunday, August 20, 2006 By RON BERTHEL ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — New Orleans welcomes most visitors warmly. Katrina wasn't one of them. Hurricane Katrina blew into town on Aug. 29, 2005, and didn't stay long. But it was long enough to forever change the face of the city and the lives of its residents, bringing enduring hard times to the Big Easy. Several weeks after Katrina had wreaked its devastation on the homes and businesses and streets and citizens of New Orleans, photographer Chris Jordan visited the city to capture what was left of it. Jordan has assembled 50 of those images in a large-format hardcover book "In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster." Accompanying the color photographs are essays by Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin that look at the "unnatural" factors — the lack of preparedness, environmental neglect and the federal government's inadequate response — they say contributed to the disaster. Jordan took his photos during two trips, each two weeks long, to New Orleans in late 2005. What he saw when he arrived was, he says, "very different in some ways" from the images widely shown on TV and in newspapers. 'Barren, empty, lifeless' The news images showed "flooding and a lot of people, people wading in waste, and thousands in the Superdome" said Jordan, 42, by telephone from his Seattle home and studio. But when he arrived, the waters had receded to reveal "barren, empty, lifeless destruction." This "ghost town" feeling is evident in his photos: Among the shells of homes, heaps of rubble and displaced objects captured in the images, there is not one living thing. "I saw devastation on a scale no one could imagine," said Jordan, whose previous works have focused on large-scale images of American consumerism. New Orleans "looked so much like cities destroyed in the Iraq war — so many images looked like images of war." Houses were "half gone — how it looks when a bomb hits." He added, "The tornadoes inside the hurricane were most destructive." Those tornadoes perhaps accounted for some of the displaced items in his photographs: a bright red Christmas ball that came to rest unbroken in the gate of a chain-link fence; a wooden, cathedral-style radio sitting upright in a canal, looking for all the world as if it's ready to be turned on and tuned in; a swivel desk chair, its wheels caught in the gaps of a fence surrounding a desolate ball field. Women's purses dangle from the low slender branches of a tree. Meanwhile, up in the Y-shaped nook of the trunk of another tree rests a full-size refrigerator, the baby-picture magnet on its door a reminder that it came from a family's kitchen. Defying storm's power What survived in place is remarkable, too: The bright red front door, its hardware and the 8949 of its address intact, sits in the door frame of a small commercial building that otherwise had been reduced to piles of cinder blocks and splinters of lumber. Wooden steps of a missing house still lead to its porch, where two slender posts once supported a roof but now end abruptly. A pink-tiled shower stall and adjacent window, with blinds and little valance curtain still in place, are all that survived of one house that stood near a levee. Another house is mostly indistinguishable rubble except for its bathtub and a pair of candlestick holders that rest upright only inches apart. The power of Katrina is evident, too, in photos of a water tank that collapsed to the ground and a truck's huge cab turned on its side. Among the scenes Jordan found most poignant were the damage inflicted upon New Orleans' tiny churches, "some scarcely bigger than a living room." He says when he walked into a church he felt "the incredible community and deep spirituality that pervaded the place," which was now empty and silent. It saddened him to realize that the members of the congregation "are relocated elsewhere and maybe found a new church" and might never be a church family again. On Jordan's second trip to the city, he spent several hours in an elementary school whose floor was covered with chunks and dust from the ceiling, which had collapsed under flood waters that submerged the school. Soon after he photographed a world globe he found there, a team of men in hazmat suits came in and told him that the rubble he had been breathing contained asbestos and they advised him to leave. It was the last picture he took. Jordan said he saw little hope in what he found in New Orleans, but has some now — the hope "that we will learn something from Katrina." Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.