Bruce West, Todd Bertolaet, David Wharton, Katrina, One Year Later: Three Perspectives; Southern Spaces

I didn't go to the Gulf Coast to photograph in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Part of me wanted to — or, more accurately, felt that I should — in order to "document" what was happening there. A larger part, however, was stunned by the enormity of the storm and knew that any such effort on my part would pale beside the actualities of what the region's residents were going through. Before long, of course, it became obvious that my not photographing there didn't matter. In the days and weeks after Katrina countless visual images of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast — some of them genuinely heart-rending, others gratuitously spectacular — were circulated worldwide via television broadcasts, newspaper and magazine articles, and the internet. The last thing the Gulf Coast needed in the wake of Katrina was another photographer.

The situation in New Orleans grabbed most of the world's attention. Images of a major American city in the midst of catastrophe — bodies floating in the floodwaters, people huddled on rooftops and highway overpasses, the grisly situation at the Superdome, the ever-increasing levels of chaos, and the unbelievably slow official response — made for exciting television, and the media could not gather enough such images or feed them to the news-consuming public fast enough. At the same time, however, conditions along the entire eighty-mile length of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where Katrina had come ashore with a twenty-eight-foot storm surge that had destroyed nearly everything in its path, were horrific as well. Hundreds of people were dead or missing. Those who had survived the storm had lost the physical underpinnings of their lives: their homes were gone, there was no electricity, communication and transportation systems were down, and there was very little in the way of food or water. At any other time, the situation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast would have been the focus of national attention. Given what was happening in New Orleans, though, the destruction of such Mississippi communities as Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, and Biloxi was relegated to secondary status in the public consciousness. Over the weeks and months that followed, this developed into something of a sore point for many Mississippians. The damage to their stretch of the Gulf Coast was more fundamental and longer lasting than what had occurred in New Orleans, they believed, yet relatively few people were paying much attention.

Whether they were right about that is, of course, arguable, and, in the long run, immaterial. More to the point was the fact that everything along the beach and for hundreds of yards inland had been destroyed, meaning that eighty miles of oceanfront would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, a process that would fundamentally redefine life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The pressing questions about Hurricane Katrina in regard to Mississippi were not "what happened?" and "why?" Instead, they were "what is going to happen?" and "how long will it take?"

With those questions in mind, I began to think about photographing along the Mississippi Gulf Coast one year after Katrina. Images of the physical environment, showing some of the things that had, or had not, happened during that year, I thought, might suggest some answers. I asked my friends and fellow photographers Todd Bertolaet and Bruce West to join me in the project. None of us was able to be there on the exact anniversary of the storm (August 29), but we managed to get pretty close. Todd and I photographed there August 15-17, 2006, while Bruce and I were there September 1-3, 2006. As the photographs show, each of us took a different approach and had different reactions. I don't want to speak for Todd or Bruce (see their individual statements for their responses), but I think it's safe to say that we were all awed by the power of the storm, even from the distance of a year away.

My reaction to seeing the Mississippi Gulf Coast a year after Katrina was surprise at how little rebuilding was under way. Many places, residential and commercial areas alike, still looked like a bomb had gone off just a few days earlier. The only exception to this that I encountered was around the big casinos in Biloxi. Construction crews were feverishly working on the Beau Rivage (no photos allowed), hoping to make a first-anniversary "grand re-opening" deadline, while demolition crews were working just as hard on clearing the debris from two destroyed oceanfront casinos just down the road. This is how redevelopment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast will no doubt go: where there's money to be made, the process will move along. Places without the potential to turn some dollars, however, will probably continue to languish.

David Wharton is Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). He has an MFA in photography and a Ph.D. in American Studies, both from the University of Texas at Austin. Since coming to Mississippi in 1999, he has worked on a number of photographic projects, including "Local Legacies: the First Monday Sale and Trade Days in Ripley, Mississippi," "Old Ways: Church and Family," "Into the Twenty-First Century: Oxford's Second Baptist Church," and "Reconstructing Oxford: Development and Change." He is currently working on a book-length project about the evolving cultural and social landscapes of the Deep South. His photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States, in group exhibitions in Latin America and Europe, and are featured on several sites on the World Wide Web.