St. Louis photographer’s work to look in new Netflix documentary on Katrina

In the months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in August 2005, the St. Louis-based photographer Stan Strembicki operated below three guiding rules as he documented the devastation.

Strembicki prevented photographing survivors within the ruins of their properties. He refused to shoot non-public areas, and vowed by no means to take any issues from the locations the place he discovered them. The storm would declare greater than 1,800 lives, and Strembicki aimed to not add to the ache or deepen the struggling.

As he navigated the damaged metropolis, spending a lot of his time within the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward, Strembicki encountered an array of misplaced private possessions: footwear, trophies, and even weapons. Yet what caught his eye greater than something have been the scores of household picture albums strewn in regards to the neighborhood. To Strembicki, these cherished mementos have been portals into life earlier than the storm. They have been additionally stand-ins for the residents who gave this predominantly Black neighborhood its coloration, soul, and rhythm.

“We all can understand the visual language of snapshots,” Strembicki says. “When you see a wedding picture, or a graduation picture, or a picture from vacation, you understand what they mean to someone. These snapshots became emblematic of the population that was there.”

This month, Strembicki’s work will obtain a highlight in a three-part Netflix documentary government produced by Spike Lee. Katrina: Come Hell and High Water marks the twentieth anniversary of the storm with reflections from survivors whose lives have been perpetually modified. Images from Strembicki’s “Memory Loss” portfolio—hauntingly stunning, but decaying pictures salvaged from Lower Ninth Ward picture albums—seem all through the movie.

A professor emeritus of artwork at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Strembicki is himself a proficient photographer who has spent years documenting New Orleans. But the “Memory Loss” undertaking is extra a bit of discovered artwork, formed as a lot by nature’s drive as Strembicki’s robust eye for visible narrative. He found the snapshots in varied states of decay. 

“The pictures look the way they do because they were all underwater for a month,” he says. “The water seeped into the albums and destroyed parts of the images. But that also seemed kind of symbolic of what happened to the people there.”

Strembicki, who took his college place at WashU in 1982, made his first journey to New Orleans two years later. He felt an immediate reference to town, its magic and thriller. He shot his first Mardi Gras in 1990 and has made numerous journeys to chronicle life within the Crescent City within the years since.

When Katrina hit, a few of Strembicki’s shut associates from New Orleans evacuated to St. Louis and stayed together with his household. A month after the storm, with town nonetheless with out energy and largely closed to outsiders, certainly one of Strembicki’s associates needed to return and survey the harm. So Strembicki connected a magnetic signal—”Disaster Assessment Relief Team”—to his white pickup and drove south. To his shock, a metropolis officer waved him by a checkpoint.

“It was a very weird situation to go down there and see the city emptied out,” Strembicki says. “The level of destruction was really incredible, and it touched pretty much every part of the city. It was at that point that I thought about spending the next six months to a year doing a project documenting what happened.”

Strembicki was reminded of these early days of devastation this previous spring when an EF3 twister wound its means by elements of Clayton, the Central West End, and a large swath of North City.

“I live very close to WashU and it came within a quarter-mile of our house,” he says. “I remember driving through Forest Park and going up on the North Side. But I said to myself: ‘I can’t do this again.’ There were too many similarities, in my mind.”

Ultimately, Strembicki spent 15 years photographing Katrina’s devastation and aftermath, additionally coaching his deal with the churches, libraries, and schools that have been wrecked and left to rot within the Lower Ninth Ward. His work has been featured in museums within the Midwest, the Louisiana State Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, amongst different locations. Last October, a producer for Katrina: Come Hell and High Water contacted Strembicki, desirous to characteristic his work from “Memory Loss” within the documentary.

“That was pretty wonderful,” he says. “To have your work show up in a place like a Spike Lee documentary, it’s a very reaffirming kind of thing. It means a lot that the work you did, there’s some recognition for it—and for the people.”

Bruno David Gallery in Clayton (7513 Forsyth) will host an exhibition with Strembicki that opens September 13. “Art History Revisited” will characteristic Strembicki’s images that merge dwelling St. Louisans with a mixture of historic artwork.