In the months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in August 2005, the St. Louis-based photographer Stan Strembicki operated under three guiding principles as he documented the devastation.
Strembicki avoided photographing survivors in the ruins of their homes. He refused to shoot private spaces, and vowed never to take any things from the places where he found them. The storm would claim more than 1,800 lives, and Strembicki aimed not to add to the pain or deepen the suffering.
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As he navigated the broken city, spending much of his time in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward, Strembicki encountered an array of lost personal possessions: shoes, trophies, and even guns. Yet what caught his eye more than anything were the scores of family photo albums strewn about the neighborhood. To Strembicki, these cherished mementos were portals into life before the storm. They were also stand-ins for the residents who gave this predominantly Black neighborhood its color, soul, and rhythm.
“We all can understand the visual language of snapshots,” Strembicki says. “When you see a wedding picture, or a graduation picture, or a picture from vacation, you understand what they mean to someone. These snapshots became emblematic of the population that was there.”
On August 27, Strembicki’s work will receive a spotlight in a three-part Netflix documentary executive produced by Spike Lee. Katrina: Come Hell and High Water marks the 20th anniversary of the storm with reflections from survivors whose lives were forever changed. Images from Strembicki’s “Memory Loss” portfolio—hauntingly beautiful, yet decaying photos salvaged from Lower Ninth Ward photo albums—appear throughout the film.
A professor emeritus of art at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Strembicki is himself a talented photographer who has spent years documenting New Orleans. But the “Memory Loss” project is more a piece of found art, shaped as much by nature’s force as Strembicki’s strong eye for visual narrative. He discovered the snapshots in various states of deterioration.
“The pictures look the way they do because they were all underwater for a month,” he says. “The water seeped into the albums and destroyed parts of the images. But that also seemed kind of symbolic of what happened to the people there.”
Strembicki, who took his faculty position at WashU in 1982, made his first trip to New Orleans two years later. He felt an instant connection with the city, its magic and mystery. He shot his first Mardi Gras in 1990 and has made countless trips to chronicle life in the Crescent City in the years since.
When Katrina hit, some of Strembicki’s close friends from New Orleans evacuated to St. Louis and stayed with his family. A month after the storm, with the city still without power and largely closed to outsiders, one of Strembicki’s friends wanted to return and survey the damage. So Strembicki attached a magnetic sign—”Disaster Assessment Relief Team”—to his white pickup and drove south. To his surprise, a city officer waved him through a checkpoint.
“It was a very weird situation to go down there and see the city emptied out,” Strembicki says. “The level of destruction was really incredible, and it touched pretty much every part of the city. It was at that point that I thought about spending the next six months to a year doing a project documenting what happened.”
Strembicki was reminded of those early days of devastation this past spring when an EF3 tornado wound its way through parts of Clayton, the Central West End, and a wide swath of North City.
“I live very close to WashU and it came within a quarter-mile of our house,” he says. “I remember driving through Forest Park and going up on the North Side. But I said to myself: ‘I can’t do this again.’ There were too many similarities, in my mind.”
Ultimately, Strembicki spent 15 years photographing Katrina’s devastation and aftermath, also training his focus on the churches, libraries, and schools that were wrecked and left to rot in the Lower Ninth Ward. His work has been featured in museums in the Midwest, the Louisiana State Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, among other destinations. Last October, a producer for Katrina: Come Hell and High Water contacted Strembicki, wanting to feature his work from “Memory Loss” in the documentary.
“That was pretty wonderful,” he says. “To have your work show up in a place like a Spike Lee documentary, it’s a very reaffirming kind of thing. It means a lot that the work you did, there’s some recognition for it—and for the people.”
Bruno David Gallery in Clayton (7513 Forsyth) will host an exhibition with Strembicki that opens September 13. “Art History Revisited” will feature Strembicki’s photographs that merge living St. Louisans with a mix of historical art.
