Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 24) A reckoning with T wo prized possessions from my childhood in Lake Charles are souvenir booklets with black and white photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Audrey in 1957. I also have a couple of snapshots that I took with my Brownie Hawkeye when I was age 11 in Cameron Parish after that hurricane swept over Southwest Louisiana. One photo is of a ruined freezer sitting outside Henry’s Food Market. Almost 50 years later, I still don’t know why I found that freezer to be significant. Nonetheless, that freezer snapshot was my first documentary photograph. After Hurricane Camille in 1969, I went to visit my grandmother in Biloxi. At that time, I was a photography student interested in documentary photography. The only photographs RITA photo essay by Nell Campbell that I remember taking were of the ruins of the Biloxi Hotel, where my Aunt Cakie and Uncle Joe had been married. A wedding where I received a spanking for behavior that in the late 1940’s was called “cutting up.” Despite this early interest in hurricane documentation, I did not go on to become a chronicler of natural disasters. Yet, after the water had subsided from the streets of New Orleans and the fallen trees were no longer blocking the streets of Lake Charles, I felt compelled to go home to 24 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
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