ABSTRACT
The questions of recognition, isolation, connection, identity, community, diaspora, and displacement resonate strongly in our mobile and often fragmented world. These questions achieved particular importance following Hurricane Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm, neighborhoods vanished, and residents scattered. Victims of this natural disaster lost not only their homes but also important parts of their identity. The story of Keith Calhoun and his wife Chandra McCormick serves as a poignant reminder of complex answers to these questions. Calhoun and McCormick, “both photographers who grew up in the mostly African-American Lower Ninth Ward,” dedicated themselves to documenting and preserving the “small-town
way of life in black Louisiana” (Sontag, 2006, p. B1). Sontag described them as keepers of the culture:
Displaced by the flood, the two photographers have “shifted their focus for the moment to Mexican day laborers in Texas” (Sontag, p. B8), where they currently reside in a mostly White suburb of Houston. Some of their photos survived, and the couple recently exhibited several in a gallery in Manhattan, hoping that the project will be a catalyst for the redevelopment of the neighborhood. Calhoun wonders, however, if the Lower Ninth will reclaim its identity and if the spirit of the neighborhood will ever return.
