Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans

In the Wake of Katrina by Larry Towell
Chris Boot 2006
ISBN 0-9546894-9-6
96 pages

In September 2005, author Ace Atkins and photographer Larry Towell drove through coastal Mississippi and New Orleans on assignment for Outside magazine. The resulting article, which ran in December, highlighted the destructive path of Hurricane Katrina from Waveland, Mississippi, to the infamous I10 overpass in New Orleans. Towell’s photos were particularly gripping — austerely black and white, they reminded readers of shots of war in their starkness and simplicity. Towell did not need to use fancy tricks of lighting to show the story of that trip; all he had to do was let the landscape reveal itself, and in the flattened empty streets of Mississippi and flooded avenues of New Orleans, the message was clear. Catastrophe had come to the American South, cities were dead, and Atkins and Towell were just two more of the many journalists who had shown up for the funeral.

In March 2006, publisher Chris Boot and the Archive of Modern Conflict released In the Wake of Katrina, the complete collection of Larry Towell’s photographs from that trip. In the words of Timothy Prus, curator of the archive, the photos are “a poignant record of what happened along the Gulf Coast, and to its people, when the hurricane hit. They highlight our individual vulnerability and social fragility in the face of such an onslaught.� To Prus and the people he works with, the photos have a value that extends far beyond a current event. “This book,� he writes, “exists because we believe such photographic records matter; it matters that photographers produce them, and that they are published. In book form, the photographs are accessible to the people who want them and need them — now, as we continue to digest the meaning and consequence of events, and in the future as part of the historical record.�

It is hard to recommend a book like In the Wake of Katrina; it is not the sort of coffee table glossy that most people will leave out to impress visitors, and it is the worst sort of late night viewing. Towell’s photographs are not graphic and disturbing in an obvious way — there are no shots of the dead or dying here. In fact, many of the pictures do not even include people. But when you see the openness of Mississippi, an openness that should be full of houses, neighborhoods, children playing street soccer and people walking dogs, you cannot deny that Pass Christian is gone, Waveland is gone, Bay Saint Louis is gone and Puckett and Biloxi and Magee and Grand Isle are just remnants of what they were. They are not the places they used to be, in most cases there is not even enough left for them to be memories. And Towell insists with his photos that we know that, and we can’t pretend to deny it anymore.

And then there are the pictures of New Orleans.

It is perhaps only in book form, only in a collection like Towell’s, where the photographs of Mississippi are separated from those of Louisiana, that a reader can best understand the difference between what Katrina did to one state versus the other. The wrath of the hurricane is obvious in Mississippi, but seeing all the buildings in New Orleans, seeing places like the Audubon Zoo and Metairie Cemetery still standing, it becomes abundantly clear that something else happened there. This is a city that survived the storm; it’s just all the damn water that killed it.

All that water that shouldn’t be there, and Towell had to stand in it — he had to stand waist deep in it at Metairie Cemetery — in order to bring these pictures back for the rest of us. He stood in the midst of nothing in Mississippi and then waded deep into water in Louisiana so we could see that difference. And it is staggering and unmistakable; no matter what anyone says or explains or tries to excuse, the difference is undeniable.

Atkins provides an essay in the book, returning to the places he and Towell visited and checking in with the people they interviewed. He does not find anything to soften the book’s impact, however. “The neighborhoods stood empty six months after Hurricane Katrina,� he writes, “with the Gulf Coast still as desolate and broken as it had been when Larry and I traveled there immediately after the storm.�

Many of the houses looked exactly the same, many of the people long gone. Faces that had appeared somewhat hopeful at simply surviving in September 2005 were now long gone. “Their homes were either still in shambles or in piles of debris where the bulldozers had rolled through. A few government trailers sat next to wrecked homes. And sometimes you saw small camping tents along the roadside, and stray dogs and cats eating from rotting heaps.�

Six months after the storm and all the promises were history by then, all the wishes for a quick recovery were already lost with everything else.

It is hard to recommend a book like In the Wake of Katrina because it doesn’t make you feel good; it doesn’t paint the kind of “we will win� picture that Americans want to hear, that we think is our national right to always get to hear. But as a historic document, as witness to what really and truly happened to the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005, then In the Wake of Katrina is a book that holds an enormous amount of social significance. These are pictures we need; this is a book that we need, so that tomorrow or next week or next year we will not be able to convince ourselves that it really wasn’t that bad. We won’t be able to lie to ourselves about this ongoing tragedy as long as people like Larry Towell and Ace Atkins insist on standing as witness. We won’t be able to deny what the pictures show us as true. So no, it isn’t easy to recommend this book, but I’m going to anyway. I’m going to tell you to buy it and put it on your coffee table and let your visitors see it, let them pick it up and let them learn. This is the sort of conversation starter the entire country needs. It’s long past time for books like In the Wake of Katrina; it’s long past time that we recognize their invaluable worth.