A Thousand Tears

You’ve heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. Is there a picture in your life that led to a thousand tears?

Many images in the 150-plus years of documentary photography have generated strong emotional response.

This famous photo most surely leads you to some kind of reaction:



And this one:



Can you think of a personal picture in your life that has done the same? Perhaps a graduation shot or a wedding picture.

This one picture below on the right caused me to gasp, then to cry:



It is a photo of my childhood home in New Orleans sitting in ten feet of water after Hurricane Katrina.

See the house with the white reflecting roof? Ours is two houses below that. The picture on the left was taken during a routine satellite mapping pass in 2004 or early 2005. The one on the right was specifically commissioned in September, 2005, a week after Katrina, to help survey the flooding.

I call this “our” house because it is still in my family. My sister has been the owner for at least ten years and has lived there for most of that time. She evacuated fifty miles north the day before the storm and learned days later that there was flooding and residents would not be allowed back into the city till the water receded. So she moved into my house in Maryland for six weeks.

We were desperate for news about the Lakeview neighborhood and I spent a lot of time searching the internet for photos. I found many, some as close as a few blocks away. Then one day I found the aerial shots. Till that moment, it just wasn’t real. I discovered I could zoom in, and there it was, the little Dad-built white cottage sitting in water up to its eaves. I literally gasped, then started crying; I was sitting at my desk at work but no one bothered me.

My sister’s initial reaction that night was a bit less emotional. She was in denial at first, thinking that maybe the water wasn’t as high as it looked and maybe there wasn’t as much water inside as there was outside. When we finally returned to the house a month later, we saw firsthand that it was even worse that the picture indicated. The house survived but virtually everything in it was destroyed, partly by the standing water and party by weeks of heat and humidity.

People in the midwest who are experiencing the floods this week understand this kind of loss, maybe more than they ever thought possible. Years from now, pictures will bring them back to this moment in an instant; tears may follow.

It took more than two years for my sister's house to be rehabbed, but that work is done and my sister lives there again. I have pictures of the house taken periodically through the gutting and the rehabbing, but only one picture of the pre-Katrina house, taken just a week before the storm to show off some new landscaping. Those are all emotional photographs in their own right, but for me, this one is still worth a thousand tears.