Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw

"I’ve looked at and read many, many Katrina stories, and I think this may be the best one I’ve seen."
- Rob Walker, author of Letters from New Orleans

Flood Borne By D. Eric Bookhardt

It's hardly a secret that there are differences between reality and photography, yet some of those differences can still be a little surprising. Take dolls and toys. In the real world, dolls and toys " but especially dolls " are usually associated with the soft, fuzzy world of childhood innocence. In art photography, their history has long been darker and snarkier if not downright cynical, a tradition that harks back to at least the Dadaists and surrealists if not further. So it's something of a surprise when doll and toy photos appear as a benignly personal presence on gallery walls, yet such is the case with Jennifer Shaw's Hurricane Story at Farrington Smith. Of course, considering that it all centers around a certain cataclysmic weather event that most of us have come to know a little too well, that is probably a good thing. These days, happy endings are what we are all hoping for as the ongoing ramifications of that event continue to unfold. Even so, Shaw's saga is not without chills, thrills or suspense. For like all true-life adventures with mythic overtones, it involves an odyssey of exile and return, not to mention a photographer's adventure into the realm of symbolic storytelling with dolls, toys and makeshift accessory lenses. Much of Shaw's story is simple enough and familiar to us all " except for one little twist. Like many of us, she set forth on the weekend of Aug. 28, 2005, with her spouse, cats, dogs and a few days worth of clothes, but unlike most of us, Shaw was pregnant. In fact, she was quite pregnant, and as she puts it, 'Monday, Aug. 29, brought the convergence of two major life-changing events: the destruction of New Orleans and the birth of our son. It was two long months and 6,000 miles on the road before we were able to return home." Prior to all this, Shaw was known for her dreamlike landscape photographs and whimsical urban vistas, all rendered as muted black-and-white images taken with a Holga camera. A cheaply made Chinese device, the Holga is prized by some photographers for its oddly poetic, if unpredictable, lens qualities, attributes well suited to Shaw's visionary sensibilities expressed as images that come across like dream fragments or serendipitous epiphanies in unlikely places. But starting on Aug. 29, 2005, events came too fast and furious for a real-time photographic account, so they had to be recreated after the fact and in miniature " this time in living color.

The images are as dreamlike as ever and work nicely as a narrative sequence. Much is suggested or left to the imagination as the ever-ambiguous Holga lens strains to encompass the extreme close-up views of miniature people and things, so there is often a sense of objects materializing out of " or into " a fog. A seemingly fleeting image of the rear of a pickup truck venturing forth into the blurry unknown is perfectly matched by its almost storybook title, We Left in the Dark of Night. Followed by the duly noted details that comprise subsequent events, the narrative unwinds across states and places involving midwives in hazmat shields, the personal experience of birth followed immediately by televised broadcasts of death, mayhem and chaos in one's hometown, all followed by weeks of exile that stretched into months.

While all's well that ends well, Shaw's sardonic captions and whimsical images reflecting life on the road leave no doubt as to the psychological stresses involved in having one's life turned upside down while suddenly having to care for a brand new baby. But unlike the scathing cultural critiques of earlier toy and doll photographers such as Hans Bellmer or Laurie Simmons, Shaw's is a uniquely personal saga, an engaging variation on a near-mythic theme that we, the amphibious tribe of New Orleanians, have come to know all too well.

Labor of Love By Doug MacCash

Katrina continues to fuel Crescent City creativity. On Saturday night, photographer Jennifer Shaw debuts her personal, playful perspective on the hurricane that so changed our lives with a winning collection of photos at Farrington Smith Gallery.

Shaw, now 35, and husband Cesar Sousa hit the road the day before the storm struck, making their way to a hotel in southern Alabama before stopping for the night. Shaw was pregnant, due on Sept. 2. She intended to have natural childbirth. A friend put her in touch with a midwife near Huntsville, Ala., just in case the baby came sooner than expected. Which, of course, it did.

After a harrowing, 90-mph ride to a Huntsville hospital -- with a police escort part of the way -- little Claudio Sousa was born on Aug. 29.

For the next eight weeks, the couple gypsied around the country, pretending they were on a pleasure trip, visiting relatives, showing off the new baby, and killing time until they were able to return to their Uptown home safely. As so many New Orleanians discovered, things could get tense. Shaw took up smoking again, after having quit for two years. "You'd have to be a very Zen, very centered person not to turn to some self-medication, " she said.

Finally, back in New Orleans, Shaw settled into motherhood. As the months passed, she found time to return to her cameras. Like so many others, her first instinct was to document the destruction. But somehow simple documentation wasn't enough. Shaw had what she calls her "own specific crazy story of having a baby on the day of the hurricane." She needed a specific crazy way to tell it.

Holgas are cheap, plastic cameras, made in China, with old-fashioned spool film, imperfect lenses, and quirky light leaks. Fine art photographers, like Shaw, love them for the unpredictable pictures they produce. "They're fun. They're simple. They have a sense of play, " she said. Even before Katrina, Shaw had experimented with gluing a magnifying glass to the lens of a Holga to take primitive close-ups. When, in the months after the storm, she took some hazy, hallucinatory Holga close-ups of a music box ballerina and king cake babies, the light bulb went off. She would tell her hurricane tale with toys.

Since then she has held the lens of her modified Holga within an inch of plastic firemen, helicopters, dogs, cats, various emergency vehicles, miniature wine bottles, a pregnant fashion doll, babies, a cave man, a dollhouse ashtray, a monster and myriad other tiny props. Shaw says that Claudio, now a toddler, sometimes "strews them about" the darkroom.

The viewfinder of her modified Holga is useless, so Shaw just points at her subjects and hopes for the best. She went through 110 rolls of film to create the 47 dreamy, sometimes disturbing photos that appear in her self-published book "Hurricane Story." She's printed 28 of the photos for Saturday's opening at Adam Farrington Gallery in Faubourg Marigny.

"It was a crazy time, " Shaw said of her post-Katrina experience, "with extremes of sorrow and anxiety." But those extremes were balanced by "the totally amazing and pure" gift of a child. That balance of angst and wonder can be felt in every photo. Even if you think you've seen it all where Katrina's concerned, trust me, you're going to love Shaw's marvelous memoir. Shaw says she quit smoking.