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How did you go about capturing that gradual, citywide process of rebuilding?
Mv favorite photographers have been Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Margaret Bourke-White, almost all of them involved in the Works Progress Administration. They were basically documenting the people who were so impacted by the Depression and Dust Bowl—a huge percentage of the population. It wasn’t just the poor; it was farmers and businesspeople.
Floodwaters are an equal-opportunitv destroyer, and 80 percent of the city was flooded. My goal as a photographer ... is to render the best possible image I can, leaving my biases out of it.
How did you choose your subjects?
I spent a lot of time driving around the city. I photographed really anything that I thought was interesting. The first couple, three, or four years, I was watching people recover. This isn’t the book on recovery, though; this is the decade of it all. A lot of the structures [featured in the book] are things that are not coming back. They are becoming victims of the elements, the vines and trees that are growing up through the properties, the scavengers and vandals that have gone in and removed the bricks or the ironwork or the cypress wood. It’s the remnants of Katrina. Sadly, many of these buildings are becoming lost.
So does the book come from a preservationist perspective?
It comes from the love and adoration that I have for this citv. I’ve been here for over 40 years. It’s a terrible cliche, but [the book] is really a reality check. Everybody assumes that if it isn’t in the news anymore, it must be fixed. But something this catastrophic, it’s a very slow-going, block-by-block process. And sadly, a lot of the people were displaced. They haven’t come back, and that’s our loss.
A Central City
2013; photograph by David C. Spielman
B. Charity Hospital
2014; photograph by David G. Spielman
C Press Park
2014; photograph by David C. Spielman
D Central City
2014; photograph by David G. Spielman
E Central City
2013; photograph by David G. Spielman
All images © David G. Spielman
Summer 2015	7