Behind the Lens of Katrina

For photojournalist Ted Jackson, covering Hurricane Katrina was not just about documenting destruction. It was about deciding, in real time, whether to capture suffering or step in to stop it.

“I think what made my coverage different was that I found myself alone in a lot of situations, in moments of highly charged ethical decisions,” Jackson said. “And so that really impacted my emotional state or my psyche, trying to decide when to shoot a picture and when to help people and not feeling like I could live with myself if I didn’t try to do at least both of those.”

When Hurricane Katrina struck, Jackson was working for The Times-Picayune. He considered himself to be a “seasoned veteran” when it came to hurricane coverage, as he had covered seven or eight prior to Hurricane Katrina.

“I felt like I really knew my way around hurricanes. Except, this one was different,” Jackson said. “This one was us. This was the one we had always feared. This was the one that affected everybody. If you stayed in the city during the hurricane, or if you evacuated, or if you had a house, if you visited, or whatever it was, it affected everybody, and the whole world noticed. That was a big deal.”

Now, 20 years later, is New Orleans back to normal? According to Jackson, it depends on where you are and what your experience is. In his own experience, things do feel back to normal. However, for others, things will never return to the way they once were.

“In the Lower Ninth Ward, there are a lot of things that will never be the same,” Jackson said. “Nothing is the same. It’s all different. But a lot of people in places in the Lower Ninth Ward, they were not able to rebuild, and a lot of people never came back for one reason or another. A lot of people didn’t want to come back. A lot of people discovered that there were better things to be doing with their lives than trying to rebuild in New Orleans. Everybody had to make that decision.”

Jackson explained the Lower Ninth Ward is often most recognized for its lack of recovery, as that was where the start of the canal breaking happened.

“The Lower Ninth Ward gets a whole lot of attention, but I mean it’s more than the Lower Ninth Ward, but it was the poster child of the city,” Jackson said.

Devastation struck far beyond the Lower Ninth Ward. It carried into the surrounding neighborhoods.

“They were all under 10, 12, 18 feet of water. All of them were. That included African Americans, that included Cajuns, that included poor whites, that included rich fishing camps that people spent so much of their energy on,” Jackson said. “It ran the gamut. And all of that was under the same amount of water and as much devastation, and the loss of life and people were washed away into the sea, and they never found their bodies. But the Lower Ninth Ward is also unique in that it was an area of deep poverty; it was an area, as I understand it now, one thing about the Lower Ninth Ward is the homes there were generational.”

Homes were passed down throughout generations of families living in the Lower Ninth Ward. This meant insurance wasn’t required on them, according to Jackson. That was a big factor in why so many people decided not to come back.

Jackson’s perspective on the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina is rooted not only in what he has witnessed over the past two decades but also in what he experienced while documenting the storm as it unfolded.

The Louisiana Superdome was an evacuation site for many during Hurricane Katrina. Journalists were kept out of it for the most part, according to Jackson. That did not hinder him from trying to make his way inside to see what was really happening.

Jackson, along with some other colleagues, paddled roughly four blocks through the flooded streets in a canoe to get to the Superdome.

“The timing was perfect in that authorities were organizing a tour of the press to come in,” Jackson said.

Jackson jumped in a line of about 20 journalists, knowing that they wouldn’t be free to roam throughout the arena. But he was towards the back of the group when a maintenance door opened. Jackson, along with another photographer, scurried to the door before it could shut.

“We wandered through the bowels of the Superdome,” Jackson said. “Everywhere we wanted to go for about an hour, unhampered, shooting everything.”

One encounter stuck with him, all these years later.

He met a woman who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward.

She was lying on the turf, her belongings surrounding her. He stopped and spoke with her about what was happening outside, and she told Jackson that she couldn’t believe the levees were blown up in the Lower Ninth Ward. She was not alone in holding this thought. When the levees broke in the Lower Ninth Ward, it was so loud that it was mistaken for an explosion.

In the months after Hurricane Katrina, Jackson would sit on his porch with his wife in the morning, have a cup of coffee and read the paper. He began to notice that there was always something related to Hurricane Katrina on the front page of the paper every single day.

“Someone asked me, of all the assignments I was shooting, how many of them directly involved Katrina? I said 100% of them,” Jackson said. “Everything I do is about Katrina one way or another.”

Jackson decided to make a game for himself. He wanted to see how long it would be until “Katrina” did not appear on the front page of the newspaper.

It took 14 months.

When the day finally came, he and his wife celebrated. He called it his own “personal sign of recovery.”

Jackson explained that within a few months of Hurricane Katrina, people would ask him if New Orleans was back to normal. At first, he found this question to be frustrating, but then he realized there was a new normal.

“There was a new rhythm of life,” Jackson said. “It was about rebuilding. Every once in a while, I would see a house that had been cleaned up, and someone was living in it again. I would see someone was able to get sod delivered to their house and had an actual yard again and it wasn’t caked mud. And one by one, you started seeing these little recoveries.”

Now, Jackson has been retired from The Times-Picayune for about seven years, after working there for roughly 33 years, and winning two Pulitzer Prizes, one of which was the first for the paper.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward nearly 21 years after Hurricane Katrina. It was created by an immersion journalism student in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on The Storm That Never Left: Inside New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward Nearly 21 Years After Katrina.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.