Katrina, One Year Later: Three Perspectives
Bruce West, Missouri State University
Todd Bertolaet, Florida A&M University
David Wharton, University of Mississippi
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Abstract:
This collection of three photographic essays documenting the 2006 Mississippi Gulf Coast offers multiple perspectives on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. Bruce West, Todd Bertolaet, and David Wharton traveled to Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Long Beach, Pass Christian, Biloxi, Waveland, and points in between uncovering the new post-Hurricane Katrina environment.

Essay Sections:
Introduction | Bruce West | Todd Bertolaet | David Wharton| Recommended Resources

Introduction:
Bruce West's images represent daily life suddenly and massively interrupted — a family's scattered snapshots in a vacant house; a ruined organ in the wreckage of a church; a clock in the rubble showing the time Katrina came ashore. Nothing in these color photographs indicates that the devastation had occurred a year earlier; the damage appears recent.
Todd Bertolaet looks at the larger-scale Gulf Coast landscape in the wake of Katrina. He photographs in black-and-white with a 4x5-inch view camera, which requires great patience but yields extremely sharp and detailed results. Bertolaet sometimes employs collage techniques, adding postcards and other ephemera, smaller color photographs made with a digital camera, and his own pen and ink drawings and commentary to make a composite image.
David Wharton's photographs focus on the destructive power of Katrina and the slow pace of clean-up and reconstruction in the year after the storm. Many of his pictures emphasize the chaotic nature of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast landscape, along with the difficulties of restoring human-made order. He prefers to photograph using black-and-white film; for him, color pictures show the surfaces of the visible world, while black-and-white images reveal its structure, the way the world is put together — or, in this case, the ways it came apart.

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Essay Sections:
Introduction | Bruce West | Todd Bertolaet | David Wharton| Recommended Resources

Published: 15 February 2008

© 2008 Bruce West, Todd Bertolaet, David Wharton, and Southern Spaces