Ed Richards ~ The Landscape of Hurricane Katrina

Every vision of Katrina is different. Coming to Katrina with local knowledge and personal connections, as well as a technical knowledge of hurricanes and their impact on the land, my images have their own perspective. While little appreciated by the national media, all of the areas inundated by Katrina have been flooded before by hurricanes, and some, such as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, have been utterly destroyed in the past. Knowing this has happened before, and will inevitably happen again, I see these images as part of the long term saga of the Gulf Coast, rather than images of a unique tragedy as this has been seen by most other photographers. I continue to photograph the region as it rebuilds. While I hope I will not photograph it destroyed again, I am documenting fragile areas spared by Katrina, including GPS locations, in case, as with Katrina, there is nothing left after the next storm.

I live in Baton Rouge, 70 miles up river from New Orleans, and I know the southern Gulf Coast from many perspectives. In my day job, as a law professor at LSU , I study the governmental policies and natural forces that underlay disasters such as Katrina. While I am concerned with the welfare of the people displaced by the storm, my interest as a photographer is the impact of major storms on the land and the built environment.

I shoot 4x5 black and white film, which I scan and print digitally. I shoot in the classic landscape tradition, seeking out graphically powerful images, usually defined by their position against the sky. The high resolution of the large final prints gives a strong sense of place through allowing the viewer to see details in the debris, and other cues which transform the strong graphic images into real life scenes. This detail is lost on the WWW, requiring the underlying graphic structure to
convey the power of image.