Professor presents photos of post-Katrina

Rubenstein Hall frequently serves as a modest gallery space for photography exhibitions. Hung on the walls between classrooms, the displays can be partially assessed by their ability to capture the attention of over-stimulated public policy students shuffling between classes. Alex Harris, professor of the practice of public policy, stated as much about After the Storm: Post-Katrina Photographs, currently on display in the Hall. His medium is documentary photography, and his goal is to divert focus to important policy issues.

Harris’ photographs render Hurricane Katrina’s destruction in triptychs, adding the interesting compositional effect of showing each scene from three different perspectives. The subjects range from the predictably grave—wrecked cars abandoned under a bridge, an unkempt man living in a parking lot—to the surprisingly pretty. In fact, the tone evoked by the photographs is closer to somber beauty than alarming catastrophe. This makes sense given Harris’s original intention: to capture signs of spring flora that had re-emerged after Katrina. The salt water that saturated the soil made a fecund spring impossible in New Orleans, so instead he looked to the people and their homes, old and new.

The photos contain playful delights and oddities, like a teddy bear peeking out from the background of a couple’s temporary tent residence. A curious chandelier stands among the rubble of a home in one photograph, while an autographed football of unknown sentimental significance is the focus of another—these are unusual voyeuristic peaks into the lives New Orleans residents were forced to abandon.

There are also glimpses of morbid irony: the photograph of Flood Street, the abundant presence of personal watercrafts and the for-sale funeral home on Canal Street, which stands ghostly and white, still somehow virginal despite the mess. These imaginative forms intend to inspire creative thinking, the kind of ingenuity that the Sanford School of Public Policy has long emphasized through social entrepreneurship to impact public policy and reform. Though it would be a stretch to call the exhibit “editorial,” the photos underscore the Bush administration’s terrible ineptness and failures in offering disaster relief.

With Katrina more than five years behind us, After the Storm reminds of the work to be done in this arena.

After the Storm: Post-Katrina Photographs is on display in Rubenstein Hall until Aug. 12. Harris will give an artist’s talk March 23 in Rubenstein 153 at 5:30 p.m. It is a part of the Provost’s Lecture Series’ “Natural Disasters and Human Responses.”