Re-collecting Family Albums:
Finding Home After Katrina

August 29, 2007–January 7, 2008
Porch Gallery


Reception: Thursday, September 6, 6–8 p.m.
Film Screening: Thursday, September 13, 7 p.m.—Remembering Katrina: A Selection of Short Documentaries, CDS Auditorium

In the days and weeks following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, many of us struggled to find ways to respond. We went to the Gulf Coast to help with recovery, begin clean up, give medical care; we went to witness, stand in solidarity, record stories, and share them with the world. Communities across the country opened up to make room for new neighbors.

They came, some without knowing where they would land. So many lost loved ones, family homes, livelihoods, cherished possessions, photographs—documents of memory. If we can’t go home, or if home as we know it is lost, how do we understand our lives? How do we make sense of the present?

At the Center for Documentary Studies we talked about what we might do, what our expertise could offer. We are story collectors, image makers, and teachers. We considered what the loss of family photographs might mean, and decided to work with families to begin to re-create albums with a new story, the beginning of the story of home in the Triangle. We came together with Katrina neighbors and volunteers at a book-making workshop, with local artist Bryant Holsenbeck, and made albums that people could take away, fill, and keep. Teams of photographers and interviewers went to visit new homes to record stories in images and sound. Pieces of those stories are exhibited in Re-collecting Family Albums, on display at CDS through January 7, 2008.

Two years after Katrina, many feel exiled; returning to the Gulf Coast and rebuilding has become a lost dream. Others have found their way back, and are working to reclaim the homes they might have lost. Others have chosen to put down roots in the communities where they found refuge, and are making a new place home.

This exhibition of images, audio interviews, and newly made family albums portrays the experiences of Katrina neighbors living in the Triangle, as they find ways to rebuild their lives and make new homes. An accompanying screening of short documentaries (see below for more details) focuses on films that feature individual life stories in the aftermath of the hurricane’s devastation.

This project received support from the North Carolina Arts Council. Additional support for CDS Exhibitions is provided by the Office of the Provost at Duke University.


Thursday, September 13, 7 p.m.
Remembering Katrina: A Selection of Short Documentaries
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium

Whether through first-person narrative or poetic glimpses of post-Katrina life along the Gulf Coast, each of these documentaries takes the individual life as its focus. The evening’s screening will feature four films: Robert, Mary, and Katrina (Marjoleine Boonstra), A Loud Color (Brent Joseph), Still Standing (Paola Mendoza), and South of Ten (Liza Johnson).


Robert, Mary, and Katrina
Marjoleine Boonstra, 2006, 42 minutes
This remarkable documentary provides a compelling, first-person, moment-by-moment oral history of how one New Orleans family survived Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history. When the city’s levees were breached, eighty percent of the city was flooded, resulting in the death by drowning or the disappearance of several thousand residents.

In Robert, Mary, and Katrina, husband and wife Robert and Mary Manuel, ages seventy-two and seventy, respectively, relate details of their harrowing experience. As the water rapidly rose, and after placing five futile calls to 911, the couple and their daughter, sons, and three infant grandchildren ascended a ladder through the ceiling of their home and for more than a day perched precariously on its wooden frame. They were eventually rescued by boat and deposited on a highway overpass, and later taken by helicopter to a bus, which took them out of the city.

Some days later, safe in their shelter eighty miles north of New Orleans, this long-married couple, in an extended, emotionally animated conversation, discuss their frightening brush with death. Even though their children have been dispersed to other states, Robert and Mary can safely laugh about their experience, and their account is often laced with humor and repeated expressions of gratefulness to those who helped in their rescue.

Today, long after the hurricane, Katrina continues to generate debate about the racial and economic divisions that plague the United States. As Robert notes at one point, “The storm has a tendency to divide this country.” Robert, Mary, and Katrina, although just one story out of thousands from New Orleans, serves to personalize the human toll of this natural disaster and the failure of the government to adequately respond to either the storm’s expected arrival or its devastating aftermath.


A Loud Color
Brent Joseph, 2006, 6:33 minutes
New Orleans resident Louis Harding gives a tour of the community center he opened one month before Hurricane Katrina hit. “Before the storm, the building was a loud color. In fact, it was so loud you could hear it before you could see it.” Harding had spent years trying to open the Marcus Garvey Resource Center, and then it was destroyed when the levees broke. Despite the setback, seventy-two-year-old Harding refuses to call it quits. He was on a mission to combat poverty in the African American community in New Orleans before the city flooded and he hasn’t given up. While sorting through the debris of his life, he discusses the importance of history and how life for African Americans in New Orleans has changed in the last one hundred years. A Loud Color is one of several short documentaries produced by the New Orleans Video Access Center that profile New Orleanians and their struggle to rebuild after Katrina. Several New Orleans filmmakers were challenged to create short documentaries on the city as local residents try to gain support from the nation to help rebuild. The stories provide a snapshot of life in New Orleans following Katrina from a local point-of-view. The budget for each short documentary was $500.


Still Standing
Paola Mendoza, 2006, 7 minutes
A filmmaker comforts her Colombian grandmother as they examine the wreckage of her home in Waveland, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina. Paola Mendoza feared that her grandmother, who cannot speak English, would be unable to navigate herself to safety during the storm and would have untold obstacles after it. Paola helps her pick up the pieces and deal with the insurance company that was taking advantage of her situation. The vulnerability of the foreign and the elderly is poignantly revealed, as is this grandmother’s surprisingly indomitable spirit.


South of Ten
Liza Johnson, 2006, 10 minutes
A girl flees a makeshift tent city. A man finds a trombone. A worker watches the ocean from under a moving house, while its owner gazes at the view from her shifting living room. In ten very short stories, residents of the destroyed Mississippi Gulf Coast act out atmospheric scenes of everyday life and the relentlessness of labor in their extreme landscape.








banner image:

Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces at CDS. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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