Dauphin Island and South Mississippi, Fuji Color
From space where the soil is sand.
From space where the soil is sand.
Ten years. In my coming-on-early-mid-lifetime, I’ve experienced a few ten year anniversaries. Ten years after the spaceship Challenger. Ten years after high school graduation. Ten years after 9/11. And now, ten years after Hurricane Katrina decimated the gulf coast across three states.
There are many, many, many remembrances and notes and stories and testimonies that will be shared today. I don’t have much of a tragedy to share — all my family survived, nearly all our homes were intact, and although I was without power for three weeks, it was a small price in the larger pattern of destruction. I don’t carry much in the way of personal sorrow or loss.
What I do carry with me is a brick. One brick I’ve kept from the millions and millions that once formed thousands and thousands of homes that were damaged or lost in the storm.
The facts have been known for so long and the analysis of the failures so detailed that it’s almost rote at this point to discuss the day. I do have my own memories and emotions from the day and what happened afterwards for sure. But I think that a better story is one of a single piece of masonry that was in a home for year and years, then ripped away from its place and left in the mud by nature being.…well, nature. We can’t be mad at nature and we can’t fault storms for growing into monsters, but what we can do is examine at a piece of what remained to see if we have better prepared ourselves for the next time climate comes knocking at our door.
One a recent short-notice trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast I was without any camera but my cell phone (LG G2). There was one last bloom on my family’s backyard hibiscus, a brilliant pink with orange and yellow pollen. But the chance to explore the black and white capabilities of the tool du jour called so strongly, and I’m taken with the results.
Taken with the default Camera application, and modified in the Android Photoshop app, but just cropping and levels. Amazing what portable electronics can do these days.
A visit to my high school boarding school, with some of the drive between Nashville and Columbus.
Mississippi is a bit of home. There isn’t anywhere I’ve spent as much time, and very few places I’ve done as much photography. I tend to tread carefully with that imagery however. It’s a loaded space to photograph — nearly everyone I’ve known has history there, and not all of it pleasant.
How do you go from broadly painted strokes to personally vivid, narrowly focused work? Where is a starting point, maybe a touchstone for focusing in on a single moment? If that can be found, then we can work backwards and build a narrative that involves the history and the presence of the area. Instead of a few vague thoughts, we will have created a solid construct to handle all the information and emotion from engaging such an overpowering entity.
I had the exceptional opportunity to photograph in two dear places in late February. One, the town of Natchez, was where I was born and spent a great majority of my early life. Walking around downtown and visiting my grandparent’s old home and church, taking photographs of places I’d been photographing since nearly my first roll of film. It was remarkable in the quiet and nothingness of a sunny Tuesday afternoon. The other location was around my in-law’s family farm house. My wife’s great-aunt passed away in the late 1990’s and the house had been untouched in many ways since. Although the property is occupied with equipment and horses, the house itself has been devoid of permanent residence in over a decade. Being granted permission to photograph the rooms as I found them was a luxury — the insight into what is still a very accurate portrait of life there was amazing.
Using those two locations as the general map for tracking a path across Mississippi, I gathered material for a series tentatively titled “Where the Dust Settles.” Below is one of the photographs from that series. All film, either Ektar 100 (120) or Ilford HP5+ (35mm).
The simplicity of a bathroom — a heater, a cabinet. Left ajar for a dozen or more years. To be honest, I don’t even know if the cabinet is empty. There could very well be medicine, band-aids, old magazines and Maalox waiting for a bit of light to shine in. But it was not my turn to disturb the scene. I set up, metered/focused and exposed the film.
It’s a new year, we made it to 2013, another arbitrarily marked trip around the sun (with a few course corrections along the way)! OK, I’m not really that cynical and I’m certainly glad to be here. And with that in mind, and keeping in mind that I haven’t always kept up my promises for regular updates, I’m going to try and add a new feature here with this blog.
Weekly wallpaper sets. But not just any wallpaper sets, oh no. These will be created from a photo taken in the last week. So it’ll be hot and fresh and as heart warming as baked bread. Unless you are gluten free, then it will be as heart warming as fresh GF banana muffins.
With the introduction out the way, here is one from a visit to Mississippi last weekend (photo from Saturday, so still in the last week but barely). It is (one of) the mailboxes from an old family home in Mississippi. It is actually my in-law’s family house, and I am grateful for their sharing some time exploring the property.
Click here for the Wallpaper as a .zip file. It includes files in a variety of aspect ratios and a small Readme.