postdiluvian mardi gras

Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Surviving the long pain, New Orleans reached to its traditions to come live again.

Mardi Gras.

The krewes resisted calls to call off the parades, dug into their own pockets, and threw thousands and thousands of beads for the excited revelers.
“I could ill afford the money to throw this year, but this is my city and I love her,” explained Robert, a Garden District patrician on the Proteus krewe
A deep staining high-water mark scars every building in the Central Business District.
The 9th Ward is abandoned.
A rambling itinerant stole offerings from the grave of the city’s voodoo bokor queen, but said he talked with her and would pass along any requests.
Café Du Monde – chicory-cut coffee and French beignets. There are few more apt symbols for the very human mash up of New Orleans demimondes.
Voodoo ideograms on the sidewalks look reassuringly like the ‘all-clear’ graffiti tags left behind by the search and rescue teams clearing the homes of the Vieux Carré after the flooding.
Is there anything more civilized or resuscitative than a Tabasco Bloody Mary and a hot plate of red beans and rice for breakfast?
The street strewn trash of Mardi Gras overtook the rubble and debris of the hurricane cleanup.
Beads, beads, everywhere. Gutters, signposts, trees, scattered down the interstate for miles and miles.
The blue tarp patch quilt of unrepaired rooftops crossing the entire city.
The natural recoil of seeing hooded men on horseback.
“Yes, I was here. We survived it. But this is Mardi Gras now. Its time to throw a party.” The graceful but pained tightening jaw of a local when asked about the hell after Katrina.

Thank you my friends for your patience and warmth. I’ve been editing pictures since I returned from New Orleans, but had marked them private while I took time to visually metabolize everything after the sensory overload of Mardi Gras. I’d like to share a few images and thoughts, if you have a moment.

I made arrangements to go to Mardi Gras last July, well before the destruction wrought by Katrina and Brown. But afterwards, it wasn’t clear at all that there would be a Mardi Gras, or even a New Orleans to speak of. As Lake Pontchatrain ripped through the 17th Street levee, the city ruptured its own racial and class levees. Looting, killing, raping, police abandoning their posts, civil society completely collapsing for several days, ancient New Orleans had its head forced under the water of the Ol’ Miss. Entire wards were destroyed, a Diaspora of the city’s best, brightest, and hardest working were scattered across the American South. Most had nothing left to return for – the lives and homes they built were uninhabitable at best, or buried in the mud of the river delta at worst. Scientists predicted a toxic ecological disaster area for a generation with all the chemical and petroleum plants in southern Louisiana that were impacted. New Orleans took a roundhouse hit and fell to its knees –

but it is pulling itself up and standing proud.

I was compelled to go to Mardi Gras after Katrina – not knowing what I would find. I wanted to witness how this city survived its great pain and rebuilt itself. I wanted to document what traditions, memories it to cleaved to, and what it cleaved away. The saying goes ‘everyone has a plan ‘til they get knocked down, its how you get back up that shows your character.’ I hoped I captured some part of that character.

100 photos | 4,533 views