Salvaged from storm
After Katrina
WHAT: Photos and artifacts exhibit in commemoration of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
WHERE: LSU Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus
WHEN: July 21-Sept. 27
HOURS: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. When classes are in session, the library is open Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
INFORMATION: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special or (225) 578-6544.
WHERE: LSU Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus
WHEN: July 21-Sept. 27
HOURS: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. When classes are in session, the library is open Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
INFORMATION: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special or (225) 578-6544.
Select photo:
| Related Entertainment Links |
| Official BR Travel and Tourism site |
 |
Photographer’s work basis for LSU show
Print
Email
Save
Reprints
Twitter
Share
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Reddit
It’s as if a carpenter wanted to show off his handiwork and all he had to display was a handful of nails. Photographer Donn Young lost his life’s work in Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 when his studio in the Lakeview section of New Orleans was flooded.
“He said there were a million and a half to begin with — individual images — and I’m sure we have less than 10,000,” said Mark Martin, processing archivist at LSU Libraries Special Collections. Martin, special collections head Elaine Smyth and LSU Libraries associate dean Faye Phillips were involved in the hands-on recovery of the salvageable portion of Young’s holdings. Young donated those remnants to the LSU Libraries, and in December 2005, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded LSU Libraries’ Special Collections a grant which helped complete salvage and cataloging of the Young materials. They form the foundation of After Katrina.
Young was official photographer of the Port of New Orleans. His studio was a total loss. The doors were jammed from the force of the floodwaters and had to be jimmied open. Then, inside, piles of debris. Wet prints, yards of wet film, wet transparencies, wet documents. Drifts of detritus. Cameras, lenses, boxes of records, computers, awards and images were all lost. It was 35 years of work and accumulations — one man’s life.
Little was saved. “Less than 1 percent,” Martin said. When Young cleaned out his studio, things that looked salvageable were dumped into plastic tubs and covered with distilled water.
“All of the emergency plans talk about distilled water. That’s because an emergency before Katrina was defined as something like a pipe break in your archives. The idea being that distilled water is clean and won’t add any additional damage. What you want to do when something is already wet is keep it in water so it won’t dry and adhere. But there are also emergency plans for 48 hours or less, not for three weeks,” Martin said.
Things like slide transparencies simply dissolved. “The thing that holds the image on substrate is gelatin based. You put a cup of Jello in a sink of water and come back in two hours,” Martin said. Even CD-ROMs “de-laminated” and were totally unusable after being soaked for days.
When the Hill Library staff got word about the materials, they raced to the rescue.
“I got the call from the woman who was at the port authority, and she was somewhat panicked because she had two days to get everything out. So I ran down and took a look,” Martin said. Somehow, against the odds, the librarians were able to locate a truck with an air-conditioned cargo department. It took them a day to go to New Orleans, load the materials and get back. Then it was time to do a “triage” under tents just outside the Hill Library.
“It was miserable. Over 90 and the humidity was high. In the afternoon the sun struck the west side,” Martin said. But they were in a hurry. “When we went to pick them up, it was pretty clear that we needed to do something quickly. Add the heat to it and that just made it that much more urgent.”
In the end, only about 34 cubic feet of material was saved. That’s all that was left from an estimated 400 cubic feet of material Young had before the storm.
The exhibit chronicles not only Young’s pre-storm work, but the library staff’s Herculean effort to save the remnants of his collection. The walls of the library hold framed prints, many still displaying water damage. Glass cases house artifacts like a Nikon camera, still dirt crusted and mold cankered. There are photos that hint at what was lost: a smiling Lucky Dog vendor, a chef with his creations, politicians, tow boat workers, street cars, Mardi Gras floats, happy brides, people eating, the everyday life of New Orleans.
You can’t keep a good man down, not even with a hurricane. Young is back at work at the New Orleans Port Authority. He’s living in New Orleans again. He never stopped taking pictures. In fact, some of his recovery photos are part of a collaborative exhibit, 40 Days and 40 Nights, which opens Saturday, Aug. 9, at the Louisiana State Archives. In those post-storm photos, Young uses both black and white and color images to show the damage in the city’s 9th Ward, Charity Hospital, the Orleans Parish Prison. A broken menorah shows what happened inside one synagogue. A box holds ruined musical instruments in another image. Then there are the migrant laborers in the tent city in City Park. Some are Mexican. One group is Apache Indians. They are pictured in Young’s photos as they rest, eat, socialize. They were in New Orleans to clean up and to rebuild, essential roles in the city’s recovery.
Young will also give a lecture open to the public in Hill Memorial Library during September.
“He said there were a million and a half to begin with — individual images — and I’m sure we have less than 10,000,” said Mark Martin, processing archivist at LSU Libraries Special Collections. Martin, special collections head Elaine Smyth and LSU Libraries associate dean Faye Phillips were involved in the hands-on recovery of the salvageable portion of Young’s holdings. Young donated those remnants to the LSU Libraries, and in December 2005, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded LSU Libraries’ Special Collections a grant which helped complete salvage and cataloging of the Young materials. They form the foundation of After Katrina.
Young was official photographer of the Port of New Orleans. His studio was a total loss. The doors were jammed from the force of the floodwaters and had to be jimmied open. Then, inside, piles of debris. Wet prints, yards of wet film, wet transparencies, wet documents. Drifts of detritus. Cameras, lenses, boxes of records, computers, awards and images were all lost. It was 35 years of work and accumulations — one man’s life.
Little was saved. “Less than 1 percent,” Martin said. When Young cleaned out his studio, things that looked salvageable were dumped into plastic tubs and covered with distilled water.
“All of the emergency plans talk about distilled water. That’s because an emergency before Katrina was defined as something like a pipe break in your archives. The idea being that distilled water is clean and won’t add any additional damage. What you want to do when something is already wet is keep it in water so it won’t dry and adhere. But there are also emergency plans for 48 hours or less, not for three weeks,” Martin said.
Things like slide transparencies simply dissolved. “The thing that holds the image on substrate is gelatin based. You put a cup of Jello in a sink of water and come back in two hours,” Martin said. Even CD-ROMs “de-laminated” and were totally unusable after being soaked for days.
When the Hill Library staff got word about the materials, they raced to the rescue.
“I got the call from the woman who was at the port authority, and she was somewhat panicked because she had two days to get everything out. So I ran down and took a look,” Martin said. Somehow, against the odds, the librarians were able to locate a truck with an air-conditioned cargo department. It took them a day to go to New Orleans, load the materials and get back. Then it was time to do a “triage” under tents just outside the Hill Library.
“It was miserable. Over 90 and the humidity was high. In the afternoon the sun struck the west side,” Martin said. But they were in a hurry. “When we went to pick them up, it was pretty clear that we needed to do something quickly. Add the heat to it and that just made it that much more urgent.”
In the end, only about 34 cubic feet of material was saved. That’s all that was left from an estimated 400 cubic feet of material Young had before the storm.
The exhibit chronicles not only Young’s pre-storm work, but the library staff’s Herculean effort to save the remnants of his collection. The walls of the library hold framed prints, many still displaying water damage. Glass cases house artifacts like a Nikon camera, still dirt crusted and mold cankered. There are photos that hint at what was lost: a smiling Lucky Dog vendor, a chef with his creations, politicians, tow boat workers, street cars, Mardi Gras floats, happy brides, people eating, the everyday life of New Orleans.
You can’t keep a good man down, not even with a hurricane. Young is back at work at the New Orleans Port Authority. He’s living in New Orleans again. He never stopped taking pictures. In fact, some of his recovery photos are part of a collaborative exhibit, 40 Days and 40 Nights, which opens Saturday, Aug. 9, at the Louisiana State Archives. In those post-storm photos, Young uses both black and white and color images to show the damage in the city’s 9th Ward, Charity Hospital, the Orleans Parish Prison. A broken menorah shows what happened inside one synagogue. A box holds ruined musical instruments in another image. Then there are the migrant laborers in the tent city in City Park. Some are Mexican. One group is Apache Indians. They are pictured in Young’s photos as they rest, eat, socialize. They were in New Orleans to clean up and to rebuild, essential roles in the city’s recovery.
Young will also give a lecture open to the public in Hill Memorial Library during September.
 | ||||
| Most Popular | Most Emailed | Hot Topics | ||
