former life thrown away
We only had a few hours to go through the city on our return to New Orleans so the shots were an exercise in speed photography. Unintentionally, I encountered some symbolism as my father entered the frame by this garbage can with the insignia of the city. It caused me to start thinking about how we both threw something away.
We were living together here at the time this city flooded, I was 19 and he was 47. It wasn't the most harmonious life together as I was doing manual labor in his picture frame studio, during a time when I had little interest other than playing video games, riding my bicycle around the town, and talking to women of questionable character. This, of course, was frustrating for him.
Then we left, as many did, the day before the storm. After spending a few nights with family in Georgia, I went north to New York state, and would soon start my college degree in computer science. Dad would move to North Carolina, where the woman he married was from, and where I grew up as a kid, away from him. He would work with his hands out of his garage, leaving behind his art studio in a rented room of an old factory in a bad part of town, a place where he had seen a man shot to death from the window who was selling drugs.
The flood and evacuation was a turning point in both of our lives, and here we were, back in the city 19 years later, me double my age when I left it. One became two, in time and in place.
former life thrown away
We only had a few hours to go through the city on our return to New Orleans so the shots were an exercise in speed photography. Unintentionally, I encountered some symbolism as my father entered the frame by this garbage can with the insignia of the city. It caused me to start thinking about how we both threw something away.
We were living together here at the time this city flooded, I was 19 and he was 47. It wasn't the most harmonious life together as I was doing manual labor in his picture frame studio, during a time when I had little interest other than playing video games, riding my bicycle around the town, and talking to women of questionable character. This, of course, was frustrating for him.
Then we left, as many did, the day before the storm. After spending a few nights with family in Georgia, I went north to New York state, and would soon start my college degree in computer science. Dad would move to North Carolina, where the woman he married was from, and where I grew up as a kid, away from him. He would work with his hands out of his garage, leaving behind his art studio in a rented room of an old factory in a bad part of town, a place where he had seen a man shot to death from the window who was selling drugs.
The flood and evacuation was a turning point in both of our lives, and here we were, back in the city 19 years later, me double my age when I left it. One became two, in time and in place.