A Sustained Presence: The photography of Lewis Watts on the 4th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina Posted on August 29, 2009 by Adrienne Skye Roberts
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast four years ago, on August 29, 2005 Lewis Watts was two thousand miles away in his home in Richmond, California. He was a few days shy of beginning a residency at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans where he planned to continue an eleven year project of photographing the city and its residents. Needless to say, his plans for a residency were interrupted and Watts, like many of us, observed the natural disaster of the storm and political disaster of the governments failure to respond through the mediation of television sets and news broadcasts.
Watts’ relationship to the South began as an informed visitor and has, over time, evolved into a participant, witness and documentarian. Watts was born in Little Rock though he was raised in Seattle, Washington and for the past forty years has lived in the Bay Area. As a child his summers were spent in his grandparents’ houses in Georgia and Arkansas. In 1994 Watts was hired as a photographer to document community youth organizing in Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. It was through this job that Watts first arrived in New Orleans, an experience he describes as love at first sight. Since his initial trip in 1994, has returned to New Orleans numerous times. Through these extended visits Watts has developed relationships with local artists including John Oneal, Eric Waters and the late John Scott, lifelong residents of New Orleans who have provided him with access to aspects of the culture and traditions of the city that would have otherwise remained invisible to him. While his relationship to New Orleans is as an outsider, Watts’ photography embodies a sustained and humble presence.
Lewis Watts, To the Ancestors, Guardians of the Flame Arts Society, Harrison Family Home, Upper 9th. Ward. Mardi Gras Morning 2008
New Orleans is one location of many that Watts has gravitated towards throughout his career. His ouerve consists of photographs from Harlem, New Orleans, Oakland and Richmond, urban neighborhoods that hold rich and complex histories as African-American communities. In 2005 Watts’ collaborated with Elizabeth Pepin to create the book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era which documents the brief yet flourishing jazz scene in the Fillmore District during the 1940s and 1950s with historical accounts and archival photographs. Watts’ documentation of black communities across the United States focuses on the effect of their presence on the environments in which they live and what evidence of their lives are visible in the cultural and environmental landscape. Spanning geographical distance and time, Watts work draws’ connections between these neighborhoods and the people who reside within them. In designating himself as a witness, Watts implies his own relationship within the black community of Richmond, as well as his family’s history in the South. In New Orleans, Watts documents quintessential cultural traditions such as Mardi Gras, 2nd Line Processions, jazz funerals and street musicians, as well as quotidian events: families gathered on front porches and children entertaining each other on sidewalks. His photographs express a particular interest in Treme, a neighborhood known as the oldest African community in the United States. Over the years his camera has captured public demonstrations against gentrification, popular neighborhood haunts such as the Treme Bar, and the longtime residents of this neighborhood, as well as the damage suffered after Katrina.
