By Dagny SalasThe Daily Northwestern
Evanston resident and photographer Jane Fulton Alt said she wanted to bring home the stories of the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans through her photographs.
Alt spoke to a crowd of 28 people at the Evanston Public Library Thursday about her volunteer experiences in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Also a licensed clinical social worker, she served as a mental health professional in the region for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for two weeks last November.
“What my photos do is make it personal, it’s hard not to relate to the photos,” Alt said. “I’m not trying to shock anybody, I’m just trying to tell a story.”
Alt participated in New Orleans’ “Look and Leave Plan,” where residents of the Lower Ninth Ward came back to view their houses for the first time since the disaster occurred.
She said the aftermath of the hurricane was devastating, even when she returned twice more on her own.
“If you can imagine a kid’s bathtub full of toys and then you pull the drain, that’s what (New Orleans) looked like,” Alt said.
She said she felt compelled to photograph what she saw.
“Everywhere you’d look, there’s something else to photograph,” she said.
“You’d find a shoe, a book, personal items like a wedding photo. The photos just found me … The closer you looked, the more there was to see.”
Alt rode a bus each day during the two weeks with residents into the chained-off area of the Lower Ninth Ward, an experience she said was emotionally exhausting.
“Each bus trip had a different feeling. Sometimes it would be total silence, other times I kept hearing people say ‘gone, gone,'” she said. “Sometimes people would sing quietly to themselves – it had the feeling of new gospel hymns.”
Alt said she was especially inspired by examples of the residents’ resiliency.
“The moment I chose to remember (is) when a 6-year-old girl inspired a bus full of broken people to sing and smile,” she said. The little girl also said, “If you have courage it means your house won’t fall down.”
Evanston resident Christine Carlson, who grew up in New Orleans, said she was moved by Alt’s presentation.
“This is all very personal – it’s still overwhelming a year later,” Carlson said. “I’m very thankful that people like her volunteer and then to do this work and bring back (the photographs) for everyone else (to see).”
Chicago resident Peter Schmidtke said the photographs showed an image of the well-known city that seemed alien.
“It just looks like a war zone,” he said. “Mostly they’re of residences where people once lived, and now look at them. No way anyone can live in them.”
Carlson said she thought Alt was also doing important work through her photographs.
“I think she’s keeping the topic alive,” she said. “As Americans, we want the latest – we’re interested in what happened 20 seconds ago. She’s keeping us from forgetting.”
Alt said she believes in the power of photography to give people a voice.
“I was able to photograph from the inside out,” she said. “Hearing these stories, what people had gone through, the impossibility of everything … their grief and anger, I felt like a container for all their pain.”
One of the lessons Alt said she brought back from New Orleans was that compassion is what counts the most.
“I learned when all is said and done, it’s not how much money you make or what you own,” she said. “The most important thing is how we treat one another.”
Reach Dagny Salas at [email protected].
