Where were you when the levee broke? Ironically, I was on the west coast and several weeks away from returning to Louisiana. I had moved to Shreveport (a decaying oil boomtown in northwest Louisiana) in January 2005 to set up a studio, finish editing a film, and snoop around. An old friend, David Nelson, had moved back home to Shreveport to rehabilitate an historical building downtown that had once been an infamous blues joint called the Zebra Room. David now runs a micro cinema and music venue there called Mini-Cine where he hosts touring filmmakers and bands—bringing some culture form the outside world into sleepy Shreveport.

Shreveport, like most of the once-wealthy towns in the oil patch, had boomed with the discovery and development of oil and gas fields in the early 1900s. In fact the world's first off-shore oil well was drilled on Caddo Lake near Shreveport.

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Eventually the fields were pumped mostly-dry and the energy companies moved to Houston, TX. Then the crash of the global oil market in the 1980s delivered the final, cruel blow to Shreveport's withering economic and civic life. The downtown is now nearly a ghost town. The fair-weather fortunes of petroleum deposits are ultimately indifferent to the people who happen to live on top of them—in Persia or in the Old South. It was with this history in mind that I began exploring—looking for stories that might fit into a wide-ranging project I was developing based on ecological collapse and the end of the oil age. I was planning to get back to work with my old, wooden 8 x 10 camera to do some black and white landscape photography there.

Then Katrina happened. I had a weird feeling that one chapter of my project had just happened in real life. The Katrina disaster has many contributing factors—some more easily discernable than others. At the top of the list are the long-term effects of the oil business on Louisiana's chopped-up coastal landscape and on her famously corrupt local politics. Add to that the rising sea levels and the hopped-up hurricanes feeding off hotter gulf waters (just cosmic side effects of burning all that wonderful, God-given, carbon-rich oil).

I arrived in New Orleans in November 2005 and looked up film friends who were still hanging on. Rene Brossard had lost his house, including all his video masters and the computer that held his current piece. But the building that housed his 20-years-running independent cinema, Zeitgeist, was undamaged.

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So in a city with no other operating cinema, Rene re-booted his iconoclastic screening series and audiences quickly began showing up in bigger numbers than before the storm. Videomaker Courtney Egan and her husband were lucky—their house in Irish Gulch was dry. Unlucky was hand-process film queen Helen Hill and her husband Paul Galiunas. Their photo blog shows them digging out sludge-ruined films, projectors and musical scores. It's awful when anyone looses all their earthly possessions, but perhaps it is worse for artists.

In going down to New Orleans, my goals were to shoot some film, video and photos, and to check out Common Ground—an activist-led relief organization that sprang to life the day after Katrina struck. Activists from all over the country have converged on New Orleans and set up medical and legal clinics, volunteer centers and tool libraries.

I won't attempt to describe the Common Ground story, but I recommend checking out their website: www.commonground.org. I did a benefit screening for CG of my hobo graffiti film at Zeitgeist, and started hanging out at the CG volunteer compound in the 9th ward. I spent a couple of days helping with some miscellaneous tasks and running some errands for the building rehab efforts, like making an emergency run to the just re-opened Home Depot to pick up seven more wheelbarrows for an all-hands-available house-gutting that would be the backdrop for a national press event the next day. I had a van. Most of the activists there did not have cars. There were big plies of communal bikes at the volunteer center.

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I began shooting some rolls of 16mm film. My buddy, artist Chris Sullivan, drove me and my Bolex in his beater Toyota van up and down the streets of Bywater where the streets were lined with endless piles of the heart-wrenching contents of emptied out houses.

I got shots of the infamous barge that broke through the levee at the Industrial Canal, causing the breech that sent a tsunami directly in to the lower 9th ward neighborhood. For dozens of blocks the destruction was tremendous and deadly. The remaining wreckage was mind-blowing, and weirdly graphic—"disaster porn," they call it. When the water was finally pumped out of the neighborhood there were a lot of houses sitting on top of cars. Yeah, in case you never thought about it, houses are more buoyant than automobiles.

The weirdness and the vastness of the physical destruction to the landscape tended to occasionally eclipse the violence towards the people. The people are gone but the wrecked buildings are still there. The individual tragedies are not easily photographed. The spray-painted markings on the houses denote what was found in the way of survivors—bodies and pets. The extensive, scrawled messages concerning pets were really disturbing. There seemed to be more evidence of interest in the well-being of pets rather than people.

The whole experience was overwhelming. A numbness sets in—a dazed state,—while confronting these scenes. In the course of a week I spent there around New Years 2006 I was able to only shoot a couple dozen sheets of film, of which only half turned out. I shot about 6 rolls of 16mm film and about 15 min of video. Considering how vast the scenario is it's strange how little material I actually came back with.

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The 8x10 negs were blown up to 40x60 inch prints. The images here on the web don't nearly convey the detail or the punch of the big prints which carry a hint of narrativity through their blunt record of the bizarre landscape—living neighborhoods transformed into future-fiction dead worlds.

Hurricane season has started again and our global bad-weather ride is just beginning.

News on my project, Sunset Scavenger, can be found at: www.billdaniel.net.

Photography and article by Bill Daniel.