New Orleans Update: Siege Mentality

Following the nation's pin-point focus on the tragedy in New Orleans during and immediately after the Katrina disaster, the situation quickly lost the wider attention of the media, the public and the government.

With the onset of the holidays, however, with attention on giving, family and thanks, is it possible the Gulf Coast might again come forward in the public eye?

Before The BAG slows down for a few days, it seems appropriate to offer a few visuals to locate Katrina in the present, and to encourage meditation on what these images have to say about message, fate, and spirit.

The first image is the cover of this week's TIME. It offers a badly damaged house and a stove seemingly suspended in air. What's the communication here? Is the crisis at once vividly apparent, obviously crashing and yet, thoroughly static? Is the situation both violent and calamitous, but also totally silent? (And, for as much as the image has to offer, how much is it it weakened by the visual sleight-of-hand?)

The second two images were taken by photographer and New Orleans native, Clayton James Cubitt. Clayton, known professionally as Siege, had finally scraped together enough money last March to move his mother out of a shack she had been sharing with nine people and into her own trailer between Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and Slidell, Louisiana. In a cruel twist of fate, however, the hurricane left his mother and his younger brother homeless and destitute.

Although he now lives in Brooklyn, Siege has been shuttling between New York, New Orleans and North Carolina, where his brother is staying and going to school. His blog, Operation Eden, combines a moving set of portraits and photographs with a highly personal and sweetly unselfconscious account of Katrina's aftermath; his mothers struggle; his family history; his connection to home; and a sense of dislocation that TIME could only hope to rig up.

in choosing out a couple images, these two couldn't be more different. The beach scene is noteworthy because it was taken the day before the hurricane. Here is Siege's account:

We had gotten to Seaside Heights the night before, to chill out and fuck off. My mom called me that morning, at dawn, to tell me she was evacuating. When her voice broke I knew it was bad. But what could we do that day? I took pictures of my friends relaxing, having fun, but my mind was already in the Gulf. These pictures are strange to me. Like somebody else took them. Sleepwalking. Like the memory of the fun didn't have enough time to set before Katrina blew it away.

The photo is powerful in any number of ways. It's strange how, the day Katrina arrived, Siege is photographing the ocean. The sky and the dark edges give a sense of foreboding. It also seems to reflect on fate. How many of us carry around mental snapshots of that last innocent thing we did before something happened to utterly change our lives?

The last image is from a series of portraits which Siege updates irregularly. These photos perceptively capture the dignity, strength and, primarily, pride of place, in people on the Gulf Coast. It's one thing for the country to lose track of this crisis due to the near-hopeless politics involved. It's a completely different matter, however, when one encounters the faces and spirit of those who endure. Connie Crapeau was the owner of the Turtle Landing in Pearlington. It was the only restaurant in the town where Siege's mother was living, and it didn't survive the storm.

When I look at Connie, it seems a shame that the TIME cover has no one on it.

(See The BAG's related piece, including a montage of Siege's New Orleans portraits, at Huffington Post --link.)

Operation Eden blog. Operation Eden image gallery. Operation Eden contribution page.

(images: Clayton James Cubitt, 2005. Operation Eden. Used by permission.)

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