Reviews: Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina, by Thomas Neff

While most fine art professionals decided to tell the story of Hurricane Katrina through politically motivated photos and documentaries detailing destruction and lack of government aid, LSU photography professor Thomas Neff took a more personal approach.

In his new book, Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina, Neff tells the tragic tale through photos and narratives of dozens of survivors who ignored orders to evacuate, instead choosing to ride out the storm.

“I didn’t want it to be a bunch of really beautiful photographs showing destruction,” Neff says. I wanted to show faces, tell stories, share experiences. There were a lot of photographers in the city after the storm, too many, if you ask me, and they all show the same thing. For me, it was more about the people than water and weather.”

In the fall of 2005 Neff was preparing for a sabbatical trip when the storm changed everything. As one of the first people allowed into New Orleans immediately following the storm, Neff worked a brief stint as a volunteer rescuer a half mile from the levee breach along Veterans Boulevard with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office. On his first day in the city he met 83-year-old Henry Helm (pages 90-91), a resident of Lakeview for more than 40 years who rode out the storm in the two-story, Bellaire Drive house he moved to in 1961. Neff’s first portraits show a vigilant Helm, clad only in a pair of white boxer shorts, standing watch from his second-floor veranda. His claim he possessed a .32 snub-nose automatic kept his home free from looters and vandals.

“At first it was easy to spot those who made the decision to stay, but things became harder as the city began to repopulate,” Neff says. “I found Joseph Glover (pictured on the cover) because I had seen him on CNN the night before. Others like Tommie Elton Mabry (pages 8-11) I found through newspaper articles.”

Equipped with a large wooden box camera that took 5×7 negatives, Neff brazenly approached his subjects. While most welcomed his request and opened up about their storm experiences, many were reluctant.

“One man articulated it the best: ‘I don’t see anything heroic about staying,’” he says. “People don’t really like to talk about their tragedies, but most felt the need to talk, to get a handle on things and move forward.”

Black. White. Rich. Poor. Neff shows them all, painting a clearer picture of the people affected. The images are moving and telling in their pure state. The accompanying narratives simply fill in the blanks.

He listened to their stories and promised everyone a print of their portrait, which he hand-delivered to the people he could find, yet some of the prints remain undelivered. Many have died or simply can’t be found.

“This experience has really changed me,” he says. “I can’t look at these pictures or work in the darkroom with the negatives. Everything starts coming back to me like a flood of emotions. It’s hard to put a handle on the sum total of what I was a part of.”