Revisiting Ruin: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and an Emergent Aesthetics of Recuperative Recontextualization

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans artists documented their devastated city in a genre that came to be known as Katrina Art, capturing the unimaginable wreckage, allowing many artists to survive while contributing to the recuperation of their communities, and providing a means for artists to remain in their city, resisting forced relocation. This paper relies on but pivots slightly away from that genre, and toward a process I consider an aesthetics of recuperative recontextualization. This subgenre is defined by interrelated methodologies through which artists whose work and workspaces were damaged by Katrina deeply (re)consider the concept of “ruin,” and through the affective care of recuperation, have imbued those works with not just new meaning, but a richer sense of import. To put it succinctly, it is through this recuperative mending, rather than the destruction, that these works and spaces become innovative and integral visual markers of this unthinkable event and its aftermath, and can be seen as parallel to (or perhaps interconnected with) the recuperative efforts of communities like New Orleans. Centering on New Orleans photographers and activists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, lifelong residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, this paper will also discuss a cohort of fine art photographers and photojournalists connected by this process.