Photos capture pre-Katrina N.O.

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Aug 3, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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He savors the stories behind those told in the photographs, his stories.

Because he didn’t mean to include the London Lodge’s television antenna in the composition. Well, there was really no thought to composition at all.

“I was too busy trying to grab my 4-year-old son’s hand to keep him from running into Airline Highway,” William Greiner said.
Not Airline Highway as it runs through Baton Rouge, but the part stretching through Metairie. It’s the setting for many of the photographs in the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s exhibit William Greiner: Fallen Paradise: Photographs of New Orleans 1995-2005.

But the exhibit could be called William Greiner: Slices of My Life, because personal experiences are attached to each.

And now Greiner stands in the museum’s upstairs gallery, connecting the memory dots.

He’s already told the story about how he was too busy to notice the antenna, because he was trying to keep his son out of the road while snapping the photo. The antenna was a mistake, really.

But the photo wouldn’t be balanced without it.

“Do you see how the antenna reflects the red from the sign?” Greiner asked. “It makes the whole picture.”

He shrugs. It’s OK to talk about this stuff, but the more interesting stories are found in the passersby, how they would stop, take in the scene and ask, “Why are you taking a picture of that?”

The scenes were something the passersby saw every day, roads, waterways, parking lots, old buildings — none of it too special. Then again, catastrophe has a way of making the ordinary extraordinary.

Which is why Greiner is so close to these photos. There are 28, all depicting sites in the New Orleans area forever changed by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, none of them historical landmarks in the conventional sense but monuments to everyday life.

For these were the ordinary places, the things people took for granted yet counted on being there. Some were completely wiped out by the storms. Some continue to be dismantled.

A few have changed for the better.