I moved to Louisiana the year before the Katrina, packing what I could fit of my New York life in a van and driving through the humid night to my new home in the Deep South. You could say that as a photographer my timing was good.
No one was interested in New Orleans at the time. Despite all the poverty, inequality, and brutality of life, not one publication would conside a story on New Orleans. But when the bodies were floating in the streets, the press came as in droves. With water covering the streets of my Mid-City neighborhood, I pulled a canoe out of a neighbors yard, and helped evacuate the elderly to the helicopters on the Bayou St. John and to the Convention Center. I was put up courtesy of the state for a week at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, where inmates talked about the police riot that followed Katrina. I was in the middle of it. As a “journalist” it certainly changed my perspective on my work.

After the storm the flooded houses of the Lower Ninth Ward became the subject of photo essays, books, and even a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are houses without faces, and now, five years later, they are lots without names, weeds that hiding any hint of the lives of the people who lived there. People ask how it is in New Orleans. Are things better or worse? And the answer to that is that it depends on who you ask. Perhaps this quote explains it best:

‘Those living in areas that look like the levees broke on yesterday, and have no hospitals, no schools, no shopping malls, still need help. And in the meantime, these folks are still working, paying taxes, voting, and contributing to the rebuilding of their lives. If the folks who are always saying we are looking for handouts and whinning and crying for this and that were to not have these things in their lives, what would it be called then? I’m sure something different. My hand is out, yes, and with my middle finger out as well to those who don’t know the difference. peace. one love.”

Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc. New Orleans East.

Images of a second lined procession honoring the late Albert Morris Jr., chief of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang in Treme section of New Orleans on Tuesday. Morris died Monday. Morris is credited with keeping the “bones gang,” a group of largely African-American Mardi Gras revelers who wear skeleton costumes on Mardi Gras Day, alive when the tradition waned in the 80′s and 90′s. On Mardi Gras morning the bones gangs move through the neighborhoods telling people to “wake up.”

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This work was produced during my workshop in Coney Island in June. I woud like to thank my students for supporting the program, and making it possible for me to add to my body of work in Coney Island, which started in the mid-eighties.

A month after the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform burned and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, Grand Isle, Louisiana was deluged with an orangish brown toxic mix of crude oil and dispersal agents sprayed into the spill in unprecedented volumes. The hot zone is the designation for the area of the beach or wetlands that is covered with oil. It seems as if the entire Gulf of Mexico will soon be a hot zone.

Jacmel is world famous for it carnival celebration, which features work by the town’s renown artists and mask-makers, and in which the entire town participates. The town was severely damaged by the earthquake of January 12th, which not only devastated Port au Prince, but sent shock waves rippling through the mountains and into Jacmel, which is on Haiti’s southern coast. Much of the old section of Jacmel was leveled, and twenty thousand Jacmelians took shelter near the airfield, where they were taken care of by the World Food Program, who had stockpiled supplies in Jacmel in anticipation of not an earthquake, but of hurricanes which are an annual threat to the region. Like the larger Carnival in Port au Prince, the Mardi Gras celebration in Jacmel was canceled this year. In its place was a single solemn parade, sponsored by Zanmi Lakay, a non-profit that provides for Haitian street children, which was a memorial to the lost carnival. The mask makers walked in their costumes carrying, instead of wearing their masks, in support of those who had lost their lives in the tragedy.

Some twenty of the estimated three hundred camps are in grave danger from flood waters as they are located on or at the bottom of steep hills. The danger is greatest is said to be “red” camps, a UN designation for those camps most at risk for flooding. The largest of the “red” camps is the so-called “golf course” camp, formerly secured by the American 86th Airbone, on the grounds of the Petionville Club, a private golf course that is now home to an estimated 60,000 Haitians. The essential services at the camp are housed in the ravine at the bottom of the hill, the area most likely to be over-run by water streaming down the slope of the golf course, which, like much of Haiti, has been largely stripped of its trees, this time by the refugees themselves. It is thought that here heavy rains could kill 5,000 people.

Although UN officials have publicly spoken to the dangers of the camps, to this point nothing has been done to move the resident’s of the “golf course.” Lacking adequate sanitary facilities, garbage is piled up in mounds and burned, and human waste is collected in pans and thrown out in the mornings, often all too near the tents themselves. The stench from the camp farther up in Petionville’s central square, formerly the site of outdoor movie projections, but now completely covered with makeshift shelters makes walking down the streets almost unbearable. Indeed, much of Port au Prince’s once public space in now completely covered in shelters, from the sprawling Camp Piste at the foot of Delmas, to the Champ de Mars across from the wounded Presidential Palace. Most soccer fields are occupied as well. And the fear is that the longer the situation remains, the greater possibility that the camps will become permanent, making the 40,000 strong Camp Piste, which like the rest of Port au Prince has no sewer system and little infrastructure, another Cite Soleil, requiring long-term assistance from the UN and international NGOs. As Richard Morse points out in his blog in the
Huffington Post the living conditions are far from new in Haiti. There are no sewer systems in Port au Prince, and many of the residents of the camps were living in structures of tin or concrete before the earthquake. He argues that it was relatively easy for them to adapt to living in the camps. And with a somewhat sure supply of water, and food, for the moment, to be had, what incentive to leave?

Part of the issue is ownership of the land, as many of the “slum” dwellings that collapsed in the hills of Port au Prince were built illegally, on private property. Even if housing were to be created in Port au Prince, the question of where to put the housing is moot. An architect with offices in Port au Prince suggested that the Venezuelan model, in which the country gave peasants deeds to land, might in fact be the best model for Haiti. By allowing Haitians to have land, and to perhaps give them low-interest loans and assistance in building simple homes, it might be possible to reconstruct Port au Prince, while hopefully encouraging others to leave to city and take residence in the countryside. Although environmentally challenged, Haiti still manages to produce a prodigious amount of food, as evidenced by the “te marchen,” or small merchants, who were quick to return to the streets of the capitol after the earthquake.

Where the land for the poor might come from is a question as elusive as the question of an election scheduled to take place later this year. Preval has said that he wants to remain in office into the resources are allocated. Critics have said that he represents the culture of patronage and corruption that led to the current crisis in Haiti.

Its hopeful that the groundwork will be laid for making the important decisions in a meeting Wednesday of the donor nations, who must decide how to spend an estimated 3.1 billion US dollars that have already been pledged for the next 18 months. But Morse, among others,
himself questions whether those who have already failed Haiti can be expected to carry the lead in rebuilding the country. And for many in the refugee camps, change needs to be made sooner rather than later. As one resident of the Petionville “golf course” camp, Jacques Joseph, 31, told me last month while gesturing at the steep hills of the golf course, “the rain won’t wait, and when it comes much of this may be gone.”

This was personal for me. I had been at yoga, reclining in a relaxation pose, when unknown to me, more than a hundred thousand people were dying in a few seconds in Haiti, where I had planned to be holding a 100Eyes photo workshop in less than two weeks time. As the news streamed in, a surreal email from a student writing about the quake, and then a click away to the first images of the Presidential Palace collapsed, I really needed no more information to understand the catastrophe. I had been in Haiti the year before, in Gonaives, where mudslides, after a wave of hurricanes, had covered the city. I had stood on the top floor of the Montana, and looked out across the valley at the concrete slums rising up the mountainside, and talked with my friend Katherine Chermantin, about the possibility of a horrendous calamity in the form of an earthquake hitting Port au Prince. We had talked about the non-existent building codes, and that Haiti was on a fault zone. At that time I thought that the slum houses would slide down the hill. Ironically, it was the mighty Montana that fell, crushing 300 people inside, and the small houses remained intact, as did much of Petionville. At that time Haiti was to be a longterm project. I had ten years to document the story. I was in no rush. All that ended with the email and the news. This was the final chapter, not the beginning. And much of my work appeared in jeopardy, the wonderful Kanaval project in Jacmel with Zanmi Lakay. Of course my loss was small compared to the Haitians.
Just as an explanation, the photographs here were taken during four days of walking through Port au Prince, without a translator, or an escort of any sort. Even in the most chaotic of situations, Haitians were polite, encouraging, and welcoming. There is much of Port au Prince that is not devastated. The city is not lost. But what the future will be, with infrastructure collapsed and perhaps a hundred thousand in camps around the city, remains to be seen. But one can only bow with respect to the resilience and the strength of the Haitian people, who for the most part dug themselves from the rubble. Hopefully we can help them in their journey forward.

Andy Levin
New Orleans

Thanks to NYCMedics, Phil Suarez, and Jet Blue for sponsoring me on this trip, and to my students for continuing to support me on this project. Click here for information on the Haiti workshops.

This was personal for me. I had been at yoga, reclining in a relaxation pose, when unknown to me, more than a hundred thousand people were dying in a few seconds in Haiti, where I had planned to be holding a 100Eyes photo workshop in less than two weeks time. As the news streamed in, a surreal email from a student writing about the quake, and then a click away to the first images of the Presidential Palace collapsed, I really needed no more information to understand the catastrophe. I had been in Haiti the year before, in Gonaives, where mudslides, after a wave of hurricanes, had covered the city. I had stood on the top floor of the Montana, and looked out across the valley at the concrete slums rising up the mountainside, and talked with my friend Katherine Chermantin, about the possibility of a horrendous calamity in the form of an earthquake hitting Port au Prince. We had talked about the non-existent building codes, and that Haiti was on a fault zone. At that time I thought that the slum houses would slide down the hill. Ironically, it was the mighty Montana that fell, crushing 300 people inside, and the small houses remained intact, as did much of Petionville. At that time Haiti was to be a longterm project. I had ten years to document the story. I was in no rush. All that ended with the email and the news. This was the final chapter, not the beginning. And much of my work appeared in jeopardy, the wonderful Kanaval project in Jacmel with Zanmi Lakay. Of course my loss was small compared to the Haitians.
Just as an explanation, the photographs here were taken during four days of walking through Port au Prince, without a translator, or an escort of any sort. Even in the most chaotic of situations, Haitians were polite, encouraging, and welcoming. There is much of Port au Prince that is not devastated. The city is not lost. But what the future will be, with infrastructure collapsed and perhaps a hundred thousand in camps around the city, remains to be seen. But one can only bow with respect to the resilience and the strength of the Haitian people, who for the most part dug themselves from the rubble. Hopefully we can help them in their journey forward.

Andy Levin
New Orleans

Thanks to NYCMedics, Phil Suarez, and Jet Blue for sponsoring me on this trip, and to my students for continuing to support me on this project. Click here for information on the Haiti workshops.

Coney Island

I began to photograph Coney Island in 1977. I remember walking through the damp concrete of the old Stillwell Avenue subway station, passing by the terminal bar, that at the time seemed very threatening, the barstools host to strange personalities who seemed far removed from the kinds of people that one found in Manhattan, or even in Long Beach, the seaside town on Long Island where I grew up. The denizens of Coney Island were a bit threatening, and I couldn’t summon up the courage to stop and photograph in that bar, but I made a mental note of what I had seen, and in the mid-1980s, when I had established myself as a magazine photographer with Black Star, I returned to Coney Island to try to carve out my own small piece of photographic lore. It was a big, ambitious task, and I thought often of the many photographers who had preceded me at the Brooklyn beach, a fertile ground for snappers for decades.

The beach was the summer destination of the city’s working-class and poor residents, who, during a heat wave, poured off the subways by the thousands, pushing baby carriages, pulling coolers, children screaming as boom boxes blared and returned home in the evenings somewhat quieter, carrying huge stuffed animals won at the amusements off Stillwell, slumped over in exhaustion sleeping on each others shoulders, happy faces red from the sun. Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, and African-American, they were the maids who cleaned the hotel rooms, the laborers who waited for daywork under the elevated subway in Queens, the men who sold flowers at the delicatessens of the Upper East Side, the nannies of Park Avenue families, the newly arrived, dropped down on the great jets that gracefully swooped in for landings at John F Kennedy International Airport, just over the bay from Coney Island. The noisy, ecstatic crowd that rode the Wonder Wheel each muggy summer night were the laborers that kept Manhattan functioning.
Here they mingled in the melting pot, and waded together in the tepid water, which on a busy July 4th weekend would be filled with shrieks and littered with napkins, paper plates, diapers, and the occasional “Coney Island Whitefish,” made famous in the Lou Reed song. When temperatures rose to the sticky heights of a New York City heat wave, beachgoers would find cool shelter under the boardwalk. That changed in 1994 when the Army Corps of Engineers, at the behest of the New York Police Department, pumped thousands of tons of sand into the space under the boardwalk, ostensibly to deter peeping toms. The police claimed that deviants hid under wooden planks and positioned themselves to look up ladies skirts, an ironic harkening back to the old Steeplechase Park, where one popular attraction featured air jets that blew up the skirts of unwitting passersby. As if the peeping toms were enough of a problem, a large homeless population had taken up residence under the boardwalk, installed a Port-a-San, and even working fax machine. Obviously, action had to be taken.

The filling in of the area under the boardwalk was only one part of a larger plan by the city to “clean-up” Coney Island, a plan that in 1994 led to the demolition of the Thunderbolt, a rickety historic wooden roller coaster that had become overgrown with weeds, and the construction of a family-friendly minor league baseball stadium nearby. The stadium was, and remains, the most concrete result of a 40-year cleanup effort that began in the 1960′s when the boardwalk’s biggest and most famous amusement park, Steeplechase Park, closed and subsequently burnt down. The area around the amusement parks had steadily gone down hill in the fifties, as landlords started to rent out the beachfront cottages year-round to an increasingly poorer population. Crime was rampant, and in the early sixties much of the neighborhood, primarily Italian and Jewish, migrated to safer parts of Brooklyn or Nassau County, which was expanding quickly.

Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was the first in a succession of entrepreneurs who lobbied the city, unsuccessfully, to remove zoning restrictions that barred residential development in the historic heart of Coney Island, the several square blocks around Surf Avenue and West 12th Street where America’s first nickel rides and freak shows bloomed. The construction of luxury condo towers and beachfront hotels were the goal for Trump and his successors. Each effort has been rebuffed, partly because Coney Island holds an almost mythic place in the pantheon of New York culture, an appeal that cuts across class, race and religion, and in part, defines the city. With huge changes occurring in the landscape of the city, from the renewal of Times Square, to the homogenization of the city’s neighborhoods, all of which are starting to look like each other, the boardwalk’s ramshackle old buildings and the honky tonk low-brow amusements they house remain one of the few references to a time before New York City had its own branding office, a time when NYC was more like the New York of old, even if the Himalaya Ride and the Hell-Hole bore only a vague resemblance to the grand attractions like Luna and Steeplechase Park which once defined Coney Island as a world-class beach resort.

It was this same threat of change, whether mistaken or not, that compelled me to document Coney. For almost eight years, I was at Coney Island every weekend, walking the sands and venturing into the sea with an assortment of cameras and my sneakers often tied together and hanging around my neck. I knew the Polaroid photographers, men who sold instant pictures to the beachgoers, by name. Some of them brought assistants dressed in costumes, to pose with the subjects. Others brought along huge snakes or tropical birds, I am not sure they really knew what I was up to, but they would always nod and smile, knowing that I was not really competition for them, and I would reciprocate similarly. At the end of the day I would reward myself with a hot dog from Nathan’s and maybe some caramel corn, and trudge back to the F train for the hour long trip back to 25th Street, the heat of a Manhattan summer still percolating up from the pavement. Eventually I shot every inch of Coney Island that I could find, and forced myself to reinvent my own photography there, as after awhile it seemed as though I had photographed everything possible once, and I had to find different ways of framing the same thing.

But the carnival atmosphere brought me back to Brooklyn time and time again, its relaxed informal atmosphere a complete contrast to the rush hour madness mentality of Manhattan, where construction cranes dotted the skyline in the construction boom of the 1990s, and the advent of cell phones meant that one had to share in the conversations of countless strangers who walked up the street, phones to their ears, screaming out details of their business machinations. Eventually the construction cranes got the best of my own West 25th Street neighhood, and with Manhattan beginning to look more and more like a great strip mall, with the requisite Home Depot, Outback Steakhouse, Starbucks, and other suburban chains appearing in what used to be distinct Manhattan neighborhoods, I left New York and Coney Island for New Orleans, which itself turned out to be a somewhat endangered environment, as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, which followed shortly after. I suppose if I was going to leave the beach, then the beach was going to find me.

But a year ago, on one of my frequent trips back to New York I revisited Coney Island and good pictures came in short order. The headlines in fact hadn’t changed much, as yet another developer, Joe Sitt of Thor Equities was threatening to bulldoze the rides in favor of condos, as had Fred Trump and others before him. Once again though it appeared as if he would not be given the necessary zoning, rebuffed by the reality that the area is a cultural institution with meaning well beyond the clapboard buildings that appear as though they might fall down on their own, much less require demolition.

In part the universal appeal of the beach and the sea, an appeal that crosses cultures, from Hindu to Moslem, Jew to Catholic, in a city that is known for its international flavor, gives Coney Island a status that even the Hamptons might relish. It’s a place to which everyone can relate, and is often the first destination of new immigrants looking for a day holiday, often garbed in Hijab, saris, or simply the frumpy ankle-length skirts of the Lubavitchers, who swarm over Astroland every spring in their annual trip to the beach. When it comes to music, however, Coney Island dances to a distinctly Latin beat. Although Orchard Beach in the Bronx has drawn away some of the crowd, every Sunday afternoon in the summer there is a rumba on the boardwalk, complete with clanging cowbells, clave, and even an amplified keyboard. The strains of the rumba waft along the beach, where they blend with boom-boxes blaring rap, Dominican meringue, and Mexican pop music, all combining into a swirling world music mix, the exact composition of which changes according to just where on the crowded beach one happens to be standing or which way the sea breeze is blowing. All this provided a background to the hawkers that prowled the beach selling sticky cinnamon Mexican stick churros, t-shirts, mango slices, ice cream, and Budweiser beer, lots of it.

If any one beach can lay claim to being “the world’s beach,” it would seem as though Coney Island is that place. I hope that it remains that way.

Andy Levin