behind the news

Photographer Aric Mayer on Shooting New Orleans

Having spent weeks in the wreckage of New Orleans last September, a photographer puts his work into perspective.
August 21, 2006

Aric Mayer is a Brooklyn-based freelance photographer who recently returned to New Orleans to exhibit a collection of photos he took there last year while covering hurricane Katrina for the Wall Street Journal. The photos are being exhibited at Gallery Bienvenu, New Orleans, LA from August 5th through September 30th, 2006.

Paul McLeary: As a freelance photographer, how did you get hooked up with The Wall Street Journal for the assignment in New Orleans?

Aric Mayer: I had been talking to [WSJ reporter] Ken Wells about doing an extensive exploration of the swamps to the west of New Orleans some time in October, so when this story started breaking early in September he headed down there, and I called the art department at The Wall Street Journal and they ended up writing me a letter of open assignment. So I went into the city with Ken Wells and [WSJ reporter] Chris Cooper and sort of traded off between the two of them, just sort of backing them up and exploring whatever stories we could find, as the water was going down and everyone was trying to figure out what was happening in the city. The odd part was that since Ken and I had pre-visualized working on something else in the area, in an odd sense we were unknowingly preparing for Katrina.

PM: When did you get down to New Orleans?

AM: I got there on September 4. I drove into the city, in a van, and I was there for a total of 25 days or so. I slept in my van initially, but we had one hotel room for eight or nine people in Baton Rouge that we could retreat to if needed, but in the city we camped out on some couches and ended up camping out in the back of a property in the French Quarter.

PM: What was your experience going out in the city? Was it like anything you had ever experienced before?

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AM: It absolutely can’t compare to anything … I really had this sense that this was the story of a lifetime, because it was so unbelievably huge and what was happening was such a mystery — and here we are a year later and we’re still piecing the story together. On the ground and driving into these situations, it was amazing. We spent a lot of time trying to get into areas that were just opening up, where almost nobody was. Once the major evacuation from the convention center was over with, the city really quieted down in an incredible fashion.

PM: What do you think of the reports of the shootings and the murders that turned out not to be true? My impression from also having been in the middle of it, was that the stories were easy to believe because everything about the experience was so unreal. The media took a beating over the erroneous reports. Can you speak to the kind of fishbowl quality of being in New Orleans at the time, when the unreal became real, and it was so chaotic that anything seemed possible?

AM: It was such an unprecedented event in American history, and I think everyone was unprepared for what they were witnessing. It was just incredible to see president Bush congratulating Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown on the national media while at the same moment reporters were at the convention center telling the story of a massive humanitarian crisis where nothing was being done. This disconnect in the way information was getting out was so big that sure, there were a lot of rumors circulating, but certainly those were really awful places to be, there’s no question. And there were shots being fired. It was more a question of interpretation … The journalists were survivors themselves to a certain sense; there was no food, there was no running water, the place was a disaster — there was a real sense that we were all in the same boat.

PM: How many pictures did you take, total, while you were down there?

AM: I took about two thousand total, which actually isn’t all that many. When I was shooting with the medium format stuff I really had to make every shot count, since we were always on the move. I was working hard to create a body of work that would be a testament to the city itself and hopefully stand the test of time.

There was a sort of strange, mythic quality to the water. I was really consciously aware of all of this symbolism that existed there, and it definitely made it into the photographs.

PM: I noticed in the photos that there don’t seem to be any people in them, they’re all of desolate houses floating in the black water. Was that a conscious decision?

AM: It was. I felt like the humanitarian stories were already well covered, and I really wasn’t going to contribute more to that, but I came into the city having already spent a morning Baton Rouge with people who had lost everything and all they wanted to know was what was happening in the city and what the city looked like. So I felt a sense of responsibility, and a conviction that there was a hole in the coverage, which was the story of the city itself, which was 95 to 98 percent empty.

PM: So you basically took a series of landscapes. What’s striking about the photos is that the water looks so still and so peaceful, and seeing houses and street signs jutting up out of that is really a striking juxtaposition.

AM: A lot of the expectations on the part of the viewer seeing disaster photographs is that they’re going to feel comfortable — they’ll deliver an experience that is expectedly discomforting, and I think once that’s resolved, there’s a sense of “Oh, since that’s what I expected I can move on.” In this case the photographs don’t really do that. There is a sense of tranquility and disaster simultaneously. Nature is neither good nor evil in this case but those forces certainly have the capacity to be anthropomorphized.

PM: Do you typically do a lot of landscape and natural photography?

AM: Yeah, I grew up in Kenya, and there’s such a different relationship to the natural environment there than there is here. In Africa, the spiritual life of the culture, the sustainability of the culture and the culture itself is all interwoven with the landscape. So there really isn’t the sense of wilderness or anything, it’s all just “home.” In the United States there’s the sense that cities are cities, and we have this industrial identity and as a backdrop there’s this wilderness that we retreat to to counterbalance our highly ordered and constructed cultures. So I’ve been exploring that relationship for a while and when this overlay of the two happened it was sort of unprecedented to have such an unleashing of natural forces inside of a city and to have the opportunity to be there to interact with it over the course of weeks — it really was the collision of a whole bunch of stuff for me as a photographer and as an artist.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.