Prolonged Aftermath
These analog images were taken within a four-block area south of W. Judge Perez Drive in Chalmette, Louisiana between 2008 and 2021. Today, Chalmette has close to 17,000 residents, down from over 32,000 before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. The catastrophic storm unleashed a 25-foot surge of water into the city, which flooded houses, business, and a large oil storage facility. In some places, standing flood waters reached 14-feet. A high percentage of the neighborhood’s housing units were rental apartments, which remained relatively untouched as the rest of New Orleans clambered to rebuild. Unlike privately-owned, single family homes, rental units were not eligible for aid programs like Road Home. Many building owners either could not afford to or chose not to rebuild apartments for low- and middle-income tenants. Instead, they abandoned ravaged units and left them for local municipalities to manage.
Beginning in 2007, I visited Chalmette every two years to photograph this neighborhood and chronicle the prolonged aftermath of the 2005 storm. During my first visits to the area, I observed a largely empty neighborhood, with damaged and abandoned rental housing, overgrown lawns, and assorted unclaimed possessions. More recently, the city has demolished unsafe buildings, cleaned up debris, and maintained sidewalks.
These photographs draw attention to the incremental changes in the neighborhood since 2007. They do not tell the whole story of the hurricane or its aftermath in Chalmette, and do not aspire to romanticize decay wrought by a tragic event. Instead, the photographs offer a view of the prolonged impact of a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina within a neighborhood, and challenge notions of what “recovery” means for a city and how it is experienced differently based.