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.