Since we’re at the anniversary and several of you have experience in NO, this photo essay is quite interesting and, of course, totally relevant to our class, given that we begin with Katrina early on.
Hurricane Katrina Victims Revisited
It’s worth following this up with Children of the Storm.
What do you think? When examining these images, what are you thinking about? Have any of you guys who have experience in NO anything to add to this?
On Sept 21 we read “Mirror on America” and “Leaving the Trailer.” How do these pieces contribute to the images, above?
In my experience in New Orleans I have seen many people who look like this and live like this. In my first trip down there it seemed that many people’s homes resembled the photos in “Hurricane Katrina Victims Revisited”. On my other two trips to NO I found that some of these houses that we had seen that resembled the pictures were either being worked on, had been completed, or were demolished to be rebuilt. These situations were great to see, but unfortunately many families are living like the one in the photos. The photo that struck me most was probably the last photo. The embrace between the mother and daughter really symbolized the pain that these people have been put through. And in times when you can’t rely on the government to help you, all you can rely on is your family and loved ones.
The first thing that I noticed when looking at these pictures were the somber expressions on everyones faces. It’s interesting that the article mentions that the Ruperts family is supposedly “back on their feet,” while the photographer seemed to be trying to capture how dismal and depressing their lifestyle is. The picture that affected me most was #4 — the one with the two girls motionlessly lying on the bed and the boy climbing in through the window. It almost made it seem like the family it passively living and not trying to better their situation — the room is cluttered and dirty and the children are sitting inside during the day doing nothing. The window doesn’t even have glass or a screen. I know that there isn’t much these kids can do about their current situation, but it just seems like the entire family is waiting for something good to happen to them that will help them get out of this situation. Then again, I don’t know too much about the current living situations (the media really only focused on short term conditions and then quieted down about it), so I can’t really make a fair assessment. Still, it seems like the main sense the photographer was trying to convey was helplessness.
While looking through the pictures of the Rubert family, I was struggling to decide if the pictures were meant to highlight the family’s helplessness and inability to get back on their feet, or to admire their ability to survive the harsh conditions following Katrina. In the commentary beneath the pictures, the author writes that the photographs are an “intimate view of families surviving against adversity,” and yes, the pictures do demonstrate that the victims of the storm are surviving. Yet in my opinion, simply surviving is not good enough. I was surprised by their dismal living conditions and saddened by the severe lack of hope revealed by their facial expressions.
There are a few misconceptions, I see, in the replies: the truck, daily life, hoarding, etc. So let’s put some of this to rest with some facts, okay:
1. the truck: when we lose everything or next to everything and when everywhere we turn we are seeing ourselves in the news, etc, and it’s always with the characterization that we’re poor and outside the mainstream of society, what we do is struggle to try to belong. For instance, I do some work in Newark’s South Ward, a very poor, crime plagued community. I was initially struck by the value of some of the late model cars — Audis, Mercedes, and so on. I asked and got this response: “You keep us down, tell us we’re lazy and no good, so the car, which is so important in American culture, becomes our metaphor for making it — and now you tell me that there’s something wrong with that and want me to give it up.”
When a people have been stripped of dignity, they need a place to reclaim that and on the road, inside a truck that’s like any other truck, there’s an equalizing force. This has been studied and quantified. It’s true.
The other side of the car problem is that it’s a way to get to work. Most people of color and who are poor travel twice as long as white people, with good jobs, to work. This fact is actually very visible at our own college as the crews come in to clean after you, feed you and prepare your “house” so that you can continue on your journey to better lives while there’s stay the same. Look, you’ll see the packed (and small) cars.
2. some said you wished more of the daily lives of those in the pics were described — well, look again, this IS how people live; this is what’s on their minds; this is how they feel, and they carry this with them every day on their shoulders. This is exactly how people are living — hope hanging by a thread. What the pictures show is not only the physical environment experienced on a daily basis, but the psychological, emotional and spiritual burdens carried by the wee smallest of children. What is their vision of the world, I wonder, given what’s being experienced? This is DAILY! As you cross campus to classes, you have to wonder what challenges we’ll have in the future when across America, kids and families like the ones in the pictures are living as they are.
3. Hoarding — if you’re familiar with anyone, white that is, that went through the Great Depression (’30s), you’ll see in their homes this hoarding: they don’t buy one bottle of catsup, but two; they don’t buy one cleaning solution, but two. This came about because of scarcity. People who experienced the depression in the 30’s became psychologically dependent on scarcity so immediately they developed the need to hoard, to keep, to guard, to safeguard. This is common. In places such as New Jersey, for instance, there are problems with deer overpopulation: why? When animals feel threatened they over produce, fearing extinction. This is true for us humans, too, part of the scheme of things: we over produce, but we also safeguard. For instance, we’re trying to raise a fence between Arizona and Mexico, literally to protect what we have –how is this different? The reality is that what happens at the macro level has repercussions at the micro level. Everything is connected — everything. And this includes the psychological and emotional affects of scarcity. So a person who is poor living in NO is looking for two, maybe three items to keep because s/he knows that there’s another hurricane coming, that they are on the margins and that the reason they’re suffering is because they’ve been left out there to fend for themselves, as we saw during the actual hurricane and its aftermath.
4. Living in a mess: this has been studied extensively, particularly in the late 70’s and 80’s, after a mass exodus from ghettos by people, usually of color, who got out and made it to the middle class by a thread. This period saw a rise in graffiti, crime, garbage that spread in ghettos. Why? After numerous studies, what was concluded is that this is a message: it’s the physical metaphor of the psychological weight people with no exit carry. They have been abandoned. When one feels abandoned, then what happens is a lack of care; in turn, this manifests itself in the homes and neighborhoods.
For instance, let’s say you get sick, physically or your depressed because you had a bad text or two, what do you do? The tendency is not to care, to let your room sort of be — things laying around, bed unmade, laundry piling up, and so on. When you see boarded up homes, scarcity, the struggle for survival — for food, employment, clean water, schools, etc — this has an affect on you.
Now some may say, “why don’t ‘they’ do something?” But the fact is, if you follow current political talk in Congress, all programs being disputed are about taxes — or no taxes — for the top 3%, bail out of huge corporations that have brought us down because of avarice and hubris, health care and education programs that will benefit those that already benefit from what we already have. The bottom rung of our socio-economic ladder is not even being discussed. For instance, in terms of education, say in NO, we don’t talk about the reality that we have — in NO and everywhere in our country — a segregated, albeit, apartheid system of education, as Jonathan Kozol calls it. Black and hispanic schools are that, just that; there is no desegregation, even after Brown vs. the Board of Education that put to rest segregation in schools (Perssy vs the Board of Ed).
So when even the institution that’s suppose to be the great equalizer in society doesn’t work, how would one feel and what effects does this have on people who exist in this reality without any hope of getting out, though the American dream — as you guys defined it the other day — suggests that you can rise from wherever or whatever in America and become someone “of value”?
I found the images both stark and revealing. It’s good that these sort of images are being taken because I know a lot of people, like me, don’t really know what the circumstances are like down there. I do agree with the point that some others made in that I wish the pictures had depicted more of how the community was doing (schools, public areas, etc.) rather than just inside the family’s home. I too was surprised by the Confederate flag in the background of one of the images. I guess this just proved to me that I don’t understand the values of this family, and many Americans. I wish there had been some interviews of the family as well, but as imagery goes and making an impact, the photos seemed pretty successful.
I found the pictures very interesting but also depressing. I wanted to know the stories of the individuals in the pictures as you cannot understand the feelings of the people in the pictures.
The pictures reveal that the family has always been enduring and surviving. The Ruberts have been enduring the hardships brought on as members of the lower class and also as victims of Katrina. As Prof. Vila pointed out the victims of Katrina were poor and mostly black. Their mourning faces and squalled background in the photos strongly portray despair and tragedy. The situation is made even more depressing because the viewer – and probably the family too – know there is no hope for them.
When I see these images I wonder what things were like before the storm, I found it hard to see the whole story through these ten pictures. I can gather what it looks like to be poor, to have had your things ruined by the storm, and to receive little help in rebuilding your life. These pictures left me with a lot of questions, and having no experience in NO left me without the answers. A few being what kinds of resources are available to these people should they seek it outside their community? What do they have available to them in the dwindling work force? I was less shocked than some others I think at the fact that only white families were shown and more at the lack of education, and mobility that was shown. So many others got up and left but It seems that because of a lack of marketable skills, and an education these people have been left in a devastated are where they can barely support their meager lifestyles. At the same time I do have to agree that the well maintained truck does show a seriously misguided sense of priorities.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and presumably, a thousand inferences. For instance, I’m left to question how empathetic I should really feel about these pictures when I see a Confederate Flag being sported on what looks to be the Ruberts family’s new truck. That flag is a symbol of how lower-class southern whites, fueled with anger about their economic position, started a secession movement simply to maintain a higher place in the socioeconomic ladder than Black slaves. I apologize but when I see that flag, it triggers me to label their new pick-up truck as the family’s delusional cry to society that they are still better than someone; and that they HAVE to be. Are they subconsciously aware of this, or is it merely a display of Southern pride?
Yet as cliche as it sounds, I admire how these pictures show poverty isn’t a black thing, a white thing, or a green thing but a human reality. The same facial expressions of dishope and frustration I see in this family are synonymous to those of Haitian families I would see living in the bidonvilles my family would drive by.
When I looked at the images, I wasn’t surprised by the poverty, but I was intrigued that the photographer used a white family as subjects. When I first heard about Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans and saw on the news hoards of people at the Super Dome, the media tended to emphasize that black neighborhoods suffered a lot. I’ve been to New Orleans once after Katrina for a conference about diversity in high schools, but did not participate in any community service endeavor. When I was there, it seemed really barren. I don’t know what New Orleans pre-Katrina was like, so I can’t compare my experience there to anything.
In reading Alex’s response, I agree that this series of photographs would’ve been more powerful if there were more images of daily life- I wanted know more about life outside the domestic circle.
When I view these images, I think about all the people and families who were affected by the hurricane. The photos demonstrate the devastation and hardship these select families suffer from, and to know that thousands of other victims are living in similar conditions is hard to swallow. Though the expressions on the faces of the children are disheartening, I think the faces of the adults reveal hopelessness. Discouragement, disappointment, frustration–these words come to mind when I saw the faces of the adults. To see all my hard work shatter in front of my eyes would make me feel the same way.
Like Nick, I did not think hurricane Katrina victims were still suffering to the extent shown in these pictures despite it happening a few years ago. From looking at the photos, I feel great sympathy for their family. As mentioned in the article, it is clear that this family is enduring their problems, and doing so without any assistance and very little support. This shows great courage and strength on the part of the family which can be found in many hurricane Katrina victims who demonstrated tenacity in times of misery. While it is impressive that they have been able to survive and overcome their troubles, it is very noticable that their living conditions are less than satisfactory. Yes, the can manage to survive, but that is about it.Like most victims, they do not enjoy any priveleges that many people possess. Due to this catastrophe, the extent of their lives is to maintain their essential needs, and to survive, and not much else, which is pretty disheartening considering its been quite a while since the hurricane occured
While looking at both the Katrina Victims Revisited and Children of the Storm I was thinking that the storm was a little bit like an earthquake in the sense that the storm itself was terrible but the lasting effects (like aftershocks) were just as devastating to many of the surviving families. The quality of life visible in the photos is terrible and the storm caused entire families to have to completely halt their lives and start anew. Of all the children in Children of the Storm the one that stuck with me the most was the last girl, Michaela. After describing everything her family went through from the storm and how different their new life is, she ends the interview by saying, “When I grow up, I’ll move in a kingdom”. Her optimism is refreshing and it reminds me of what Hector said about our class after reading our blog posts. He said we were all so optimistic after the future and it made me wonder if this is a characteristic of youth in general or just our generation.
I’m glad I got to see these photos because generally people to tend to forget about disasters like Katrina as time passes and they leave the daily news. Just like how Americans are generally apathetic about things that don’t directly affect them, they also have a very short memory. One disaster occurs and then people lose interest until something else occurs that grabs their attention.
These photographs did a good job at illustrating the living experiences of some in Louisiana. The poverty is bound to make anyone viewing the images at least a little uncomfortable. But, I think these photographs do not do nearly enough to illustrate the “children of the storm.” There is so much more to the story that is missing which either leaves the viewer questioning or assuming. How has Katrina affected the education system? Recreation? Community? Health? And maybe even a larger question, what were these things like prior to the storm and has much really changed?
…to Nick. Although I cannot argue a case for this specific family because I do not know them, I can argue for families I have met in Louisiana who demonstrate a similar trend. From what I have seen, many many people in the South “hoard” things, and do not dispose of items that can be used at later times. This may be because of poverty—wanting to save things because they could be used at a later time, saving things to give to their children at a later time, or just plain saving it because they have had it in their family for a long time. As for their car—and this applies as well to clothing, etc.—this is something you see all over, people who have little money still have the fanciest and newest items. So, I think we need to remember that we cannot necessarily criticize their choices, because a lot of it is influenced/or part of their culture.
When viewing the images, I was surprised that families devastated by hurricane Katrina years later were not much better off. Their struggles are evident through the looks in their eyes and somber faces. To be honest, though, I don’t have experience with New Orleans, and I probably lack the knowledge I should have regarding this topic. Despite this, the pictures are real to me. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but notice the Rubert’s nicely-kept truck. And to a certain point, the house and yard shown in the pictures could be less of a mess than they are. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of a care on the family’s part, but even under the burden of poverty, loose things in rooms can be put away and trash can be taken out. The reason behind the mess is possibly due to the way the family was brought up and from the Katrina disaster, but I also see a family void of care, unless I’m mistaking it with a loss of hope.