Drag your cursor (on a computer) or swipe your finger (on a phone or tablet) across each photo below. The 2005 Hurricane Katrina photo will dissolve into a picture from the identical vantage point nine years later.
Through many years of covering hurricanes, I've learned that it's important to "photograph the wind." That's tough in a still picture, but that was my intent while driving down Canal Street while the storm was in its fury. The wind was violently shaking my truck and sheets of tin were peeling off rooftops and flying in my direction. I found the billboard banner wrapped on power lines. Finding this spot nine years later was tough. Although I had plenty of visual cues to work with, the sweet spot was in the middle of Rampart Street, standing on the streetcar tracks. The original shot was made from my truck. But now it wasn't so easy. After every attempt, as I scurried between traffic light sequences and streetcar traffic, I drew an X on the street to index my efforts. Once I found the spot, I waited for the streetcar to fill the frame.
I first comprehended the true devastation of the storm when I walked across the St. Claude Bridge and surveyed the flooded landscape of the Lower 9th Ward. The scope of the flooding was beyond comprehension. The first house I came to was filled with human drama. As the hurricane force winds and rain continued, four women and three children clung to the house's front porch posts, to each other and to life itself. Their faces expressed both desperation and resignation. They had fought the waters and the prospect of death for hours by the time I arrived. Later, while studying the photo, I realized that they weren't standing on their porch as I originally assumed but were balancing themselves on the porch's handrail. In the after photo, I can see they were saved by a 2-by-4 piece of pine.
As the winds died down on the afternoon of Aug. 29, 2005, I hitched a ride on one of the first rescue boats working the area near the St. Claude Bridge. We rescued people from rooftops deep into Chalmette. Along the way, we came across a woman in a life vest swimming down the street. We asked if she needed help as we drew near. To our surprise, she said, "No. I'm swimming to New Orleans." From her movements in the water, I had imagined her shoving herself against the current by extending her toes down to the pavement. Nine years later I searched for most of an hour for the same location. The scene was about where I thought it would be but didn't look like I expected. When I tried to recreate the angles, I discovered that I needed a 12-foot ladder to replicate the depth of the water. The tips of the fence posts in the background were 10 feet above the sidewalk.
As people struggled to make sense of the rising waters caused by levee-failure flooding, John McCusker found three men helping a woman ferry babies in a red plastic tub down Broad Street. I found the location with little trouble. There were many elements in the picture that guided me to the exact location. The problem was, it was in the middle of Broad Street, with traffic coming from behind, over the bridge. It took many attempts to nail down the exact spot and the tilt of the camera, but once found, I simply waited for people crossing over to the courts.
By Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, three days after the storm made landfall, the Morial Convention Center had become the epicenter of desperation. Over 30,000 people had migrated to the site looking for help, and there was none to be had. I arrived with six other journalists who had banded together for safety. As we approached the intersection of the grand Convention Center Boulevard, people instantly mobbed us, eager to show us the horrors of the scene. It dawned on me that they were pleading through the lenses of our cameras for help. This was the hardest of the gallery of photos to re-set. I wanted the after photo to say so much more in honor of the people who suffered here.
On Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005, Eliot Kamenitz documented the chaos at the Causeway Boulevard-Interstate 10 interchange. Buses were arriving to transport the throngs trapped for nearly a week in the flooded city. As helicopters swept in and out ferrying the desperately ill, many observers viewing this scene asked how it could possibly be happening in America. The symbolism of this photo is powerful, as it captures the broken city and its broken-hearted residents in a single frame. Revisiting this scene was personal for me as well. It was here that I scrambled aboard a Blackhawk on day 2 to capture my first aerial views of the flood. Today, I often hear tourists and visitors remark about how surprised they are to see no scars remaining of Katrina. The main artery of the city so efficiently transports folks from the airport to the French Quarter, who would know?
Nine days after the storm, photographer Alex Brandon was riding in a heavy-duty delivery truck on Earhart Boulevard when he photographed the courtyard scene in the BW Cooper Housing Development. A resident was returning to his apartment in the fishing boat with a supply of drinking water when the helicopter dropped down to rescue people who were ready to go. Today, BW Cooper is nearing the end of a rebuild initiative, but several of these buildings remain to provide visual context for what once was.
In September of 2005, John McCusker photographed a security worker as he walked past destroyed houses in Lakeview near the break in the 17th Street Canal. This was a perfect choice to reshoot since the two houses in the photo have been rebuilt. The location was iconic. The water lines are clearly visible on the exterior walls. When I located the corner, I was surprised to find new landscaping blocking the view. After carefully studying the angles and rooflines as they compared with each other, it became clear that the spot McCusker stood was now crowded by a large bush and a stop sign. I also needed about six feet of elevation to match the debris pile the security worker was walking on. A ladder and a tripod solved both of these issues.
I find this transition to one of the most compelling, blending Ellis Lucia's dramatic photo of the breach of the Industrial Canal that devastated the Lower 9th Ward into the current-day neighborhood dotted with bright, cheery Brad Pitt homes. In the background of the "before" photo, you can see the barge that many believe created the explosive boom heard by many residents. In the same spot in the "after" photo, a tour stops for a closer look at the floodwall. Lucia made the photo from the Claiborne Ave. Bridge. Shooting the "after" photo from the bridge proved to be a real problem. There is no sidewalk to work from. To solve the problem, I mounted a camera on my car and guessed at the proper angle and tilt. I then drove to the foot of the bridge and waited for the traffic light behind me to stop the constant flow of cars and heavy trucks. I then quickly drove to the estimated spot and used a remote to fire a burst of sequences as I drove near the rail. I repeated the process over and over, with minute adjustments of the angles until I got it right.
Scott Threlkeld photographed the ruined fishing pier at Fontainebleau State Park in Mandeville, beautifully composing the image with a wind-weary cypress tree. The concrete piers collapsed into the lake looked especially forlorn. The position was easy enough to find, since the tree was still there, although new landscaping renovations raised the ground level more than a foot. I carefully positioned and repositioned the tripod until the lines of the tree, pier and the horizon matched perfectly and then waited for more than two hours for the right people to complete the composition.
I remember walking into the neighborhood surrounding the breach at the London Avenue Canal, finding houses swept from their foundations and interiors filled with silt. When I came across the old Ford Mustang and the truck, I felt like I was somehow walking on hallowed ground. The buried vehicles below my feet reminded me of a graveyard. When I returned several weeks later, the silt had been removed for search and rescue. The truck was now uncovered, the passenger window painted over with a "DB", the inscription left to identify a dead body. To recreate the angle, I photographed this scene from atop my SUV, an irony not lost on me. Visiting the lot is still haunting, even though many of the houses and all the debris has been removed. Nature has reclaimed everything but the slab.
While searching our vast archives for the proper photos to revisit, Jennifer Zdon's stunning photo of the debris pile in the West End Boulevard neutral ground suddenly jumped to mind. But the one requirement was in question: Was the Lakeview sign still there? The answer, as you can see, was yes! With only one real remaining element in the photo, the reshoot was fairly straightforward, except for one concept. I wanted to have a person in the same spot as the earlier photo. From there, it was just a waiting game.
Credits: All images are from the NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune photo archive. Captions are by staff photographer Ted Jackson. Interactive photo tools by digital operations producer Ray Koenig. Read more about the project, and Jackson's Katrina recollections, in a personal essay.