John Woodin, Snowball stand, 2622 Flood Street, 2004, and near Florida Avenue, 2005, 2008.

THE ARTIST: JOHN WOODIN

     John Woodin is a contemporary photographer who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961. He spent his childhood and early adulthood in New Orleans, attending the University of New Orleans where he received his Bachelor's degree in Communications. he left the south to pursue his M.F.A. in Photography at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has been a Philadelphia resident ever since, and has taught photography at the University of the Arts since the year 1990. 

     

It was in 2004 that Woodin realized that the fine art photography work he was creating was inseparably tied to his formative experiences growing up in New Orleans. A desire to recapture memories that were fading from his mind of his childhood environment led him to return to New Orleans in to begin a formal study of the city's unique architecture. Eschewing a stylized representation and romanticization of his subjects, Woodin instead chose to portray the structures of his old haunts in an objective manner. Focusing on the details of the environments and creating a realistic and detached portrayal of his subjects, Woodin revealed a mix of architectural order among the social chaos that spoke volumes about the unique character of the City of New Orleans. Avoiding the traditional Bourbon Street locales so frequently associated with the city, Woodin instead documented the poorer areas, which reveal subtle hints to the real personality of the city as opposed to more popular areas. many of the structures can be considered archetypically 'Southern', and even further, archetypically 'New Orlean' in terms of their physical qualities. 

     It was an unexpected turn of events when Hurricane Karina barreled into the Gulf Coast region in August of 2005. The destruction wrought by the storm was on a scale previously unimagined by the people of the United States. The sheer amount of damage, loss of life, widespread displacement of the surviving residents, as well as the federal government's slow response to the calamity polarized the nation as well as the Delta region, and the whole country was sent reeling in its wake. The face of New Orleans was radically altered, physically and psychologically, and remains so to this day.

     Woodin was among the first in a series of photographers allowed back into the city after the search and recovery efforts were abandoned. He reentered the city not as a photographer, but as a resident, intent on salvaging what was left of his childhood home with his family. It was after this heart-wrenching experience that Woodin decided to return to the locations that he had documented a year before, and re-photograph them to show the effects that the devastating hurricane had brought to them. Woodin then collected the newly-created diptychs into a monograph titled 'City of Memory' which was published by The Center for American Places in 2010.

THE WORK: 'SNOWBALL STAND, 2622 FLOOD STREET 2004, AND NEAR FLORIDA AVENUE, 2005, 2008'

     These particular photographs are unique as they are a triptych rather than a diptych, and represent Woodin's evolving vision for this body of work perfectly. taken over the course of 4 years, they work independently as masterful photographs in their own right, but when brought into conjunction with one another, they speak volumes about the events that they were witness to as well as how we attach memories to specific locations at specific times.

     in the first photograph, Woodin's intention was to document a specific structure that perhaps has a nostalgic and regionally specific relevance to him, and to the greater character of New Orleans architecture. There is attention paid to the fact that this structure is somewhat dilapidated, a common theme in his pre-Katrina photographs. This is an attempt to convey the social and economic state of the city, and sheds light on the plight of the economically depressed communities that many would choose to otherwise ignore. it is also a portrait of a uniquely charming structure, innocent and playful in its association with childhood and humid afternoons spent eating snowcones. the photograph is ripe with wistfulness and fading nostalgia (its emptiness, the peeling paint, etc.) , yet retains a decidedly adult detachment in the way the subject was documented. 

     

     The second photograph from 2005 reveals a shocking turn of events that Woodin could have never envisioned. Here is the same structure, having suffered the terrible caprices of Hurricane Katrina, shot in exactly the same manner, but one can deduce that the floodwaters had picked the small structure up and deposited it far from its original location.  one of Hurricane Katrina's effects was to irrevocably alter the landscape that was so familiar to thousands of residents of New Orleans, creating a twisted parody of its previous incarnation. Woodin reacted to this photographically by retaining the same focal lengths and camera angles, which had the effect of emphasizing the changes wrought by the storm. some are subtle, like the fact that the structure itself seems to have escaped relatively unscathed, yet its location is radically different. Additionally, whereas Woodin's previous memory of the snowball stand was linked to its original location, Katrina has created a new memory for Woodin by relocating the snowball stand in a new place. This new memory will always be inextricably linked to Katrina. 

     

     The third photograph illustrates the effects of time and age on the structure itself. In the photograph shot in 2008, the stand is deteriorating in its new location. Perhaps this is the effect of the structure standing in water for several years. Woodin illustrates here the passage of time, and the neglect of the structure. One may wonder that if the stand had not ended up where it did, or had not moved at all, would it possibly have been saved from its current fate? were there others who had the same nostalgic attachment for the stand that Woodin did? In any event, this photograph represents yet a new memory, the most recent of a series of memories that can be re-lived in the physical world by viewing these photographs.

MY REACTION TO THE WORK:

     I had spent time in both Louisiana and Mississippi when I was in the Navy, first in 2003 for the greater part of a year, then briefly again in 2006. I enjoyed my stay in Biloxi, where I was training to be a meteorologist. I found the character of the area to contain a subtlety that I hadn't found in other places, and was quite charmed by it after a while. In 2006 I specifically returned to the area to visit a friend I had made in Mississippi, and was taken to New Orleans to see what had happened to these areas after Katrina. In a way, my experience mirrored Woodin's in that what I saw when I returned was at once familiar but forever altered by the effects of the hurricane. It was a singularly strange and surreal experience, even though I only spent a few months in the area. Woodin's experience was many times more intense, as would mine be if my hometown was devastated by a major natural disaster. Woodin's style of photography is one that I would enjoy even if the subject matter was not so immediately compelling to me, but the fact that I had spent time in this part of the country during these times makes them special to me as well. Woodin did what I wanted to do, but did not have the opportunity to do so, and did it in a manner that only someone with close, long-term familial and emotional ties to the area could have done properly. this body of work, and these photographs in particular hold memories for me, for they remind me of the feelings I had while wandering around in Biloxi, Waveland and in New Orleans when I was there. it will be interesting to see if Woodin continues to document these locations in the future, and if he does, I will be very interested to see the further evolution of the 'City of Memory' series. 

WORKS CITED:

Woodin, John, and Craig E. Colten. City of Memory: New Orleans before and after Katrina. Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010. Print. 

"City of Memory." Columbia College Chicago :. Web. 03 May 2012. <http://www.colum.edu/CCCPress/books/city-of-memory.php>.