Remembering New Orleans

     “Photographs of New Orleans After Katrinaâ€�, Ozier Muhammad’s new show at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery, is an evocative mix of depressing and uplifting images:  unbelievable devastation, sadness, loss, hope and the will to not just survive but overcome, an unquenchable belief in town and country — even a country that nearly turned its back on its most singular city.

   Muhammad is a New York Times photographer and Pulitzer Prize-winner (while at Newsday) for a series on hunger in Africa. He has photographed wars, famine, disease, Mandela’s election in South Africa. But never in his career, I think, did he imagine the post-catastrophic world that Katrina produced in his own country: One million people displaced, hundreds dead,  bodies floating down water-filled streets, a city attacked by nature and the bungling of government.

   These pictures — all in color, not the black-and-white of newspaper — are intensely human and full of the juxtapositions and contrasts that inform life, but do so uniquely in New Orleans:

   African-American poor and better-off whites surveying domestic devastation.

   A man and his aunt looking at the couch under which a relative died in the flood.

   A man reading a newspaper on his front porch, flood detritus piled on the street in front of him, an American flag on the wall above his head.

   A huge tree lying across the roof of a small bungalow under the gray Gulf clouds.

   A derelict row boat still floating in front of a house.

   Personal photographs left behind on a lonely wall in an abandoned 9th-Ward house.

   Black hands on a repaired levee, FEMA house trailers on flatbed rail cars at sunrise, a marching jazz band in front of new, brightly painted bungalows, residents, not tourists, on Bourbon Street, music, energy, determination, color, the flag.  

   Muhammad’s work tells a story that continues in a much diminished, still rebuilding city.  And tells it with quiet, beautiful impact. A story as testament and a warning for the future.

   The Ozier Muhammad show is in the Tremaine Gallery at Hotchkiss through Dec. 11.  Hours are Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sun., 12-4 p.m. For information, call 860-435-4423.