Some Things to Consider Over Spring Break!

Suggested Digestion
You need to be inspired in order to get where you are going here are some great tools:


READING

* Zeitoun – by Dave Eggers (textbook required) – Vintage
Since this is the required text, at the least, you should get on Amazon end order it, but start reading it, and you will be ahead of the game! It is a very fast read. So you are prepared, you will be asked to write a reflective essay on the book, so keep notes for your NOLA blog!

Suggested Reading:

Doing Documentary Work – Robert Coles - Oxford University Press

Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers – Ken Light – Smithsonian Books

The Journey is the Destination - The Journals of Dan Eldon - Dan Elson – Chronicle Books

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge - Josh Neufeld – Pantheon

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast - Douglas G. Brinkley – Harper Perrennial

Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City – Jed Horne – Random House

Why New Orleans Matters – Tom Piazza – Harper Perennial

The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities– Mike Tidwell – Free Press

A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams (Play, 1947)




WATCHING
*American Experience: New Orleans – PBS (required during pre-travel course)

*When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts – Spike Lee (required during pre-travel course)

*The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia (required during pre-travel course)

These are the required films. You may want to watch them in advance of the rush of the quarter. So you are prepared, you will be asked to write a reflective essay on each, so keep notes for your NOLA blog!


Suggested viewing:

Treme – 2010 – HBO Series

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – 2009

Angel Heart – 1987

All the King’s Men – 2006

The Big Easy – 1987


LISTENING

This American Life - NPR - thislife.org
#296 "After the Flood"


This American Life - NPR - thislife.org
#297 "This is no my Beautiful House"


This American Life - NPR - thislife.org
#372 "The Inauguration Show"

June 19-27, 2011 * JOIN US!

Summer 2011 New Orleans Trip Registration Now Open

The Photography Program is happy to announce the 2011 New Orleans Travel & Study Program! The class will travel June 19-27, with pre-travel session meetings starting in March.

The course will include visiting photographers and curators to critiques, museum tours, a whole city tour, a behind the scenes tour of the Time Picayune newspaper, and much much more!

Take Photographic Essays and Visual Narratives (PH3410) which can be subbed for Short Media Production (DF3430) in America's rich cultural southern capital, New Orleans! Learn about the culture, history, and fantastic cuisine, that make this amazing city so famous. Work on a project that captures that spirit, in the midst of recovery six years after Hurricane Katrina and one since the disastrous BP oil spill. (Prerequisite PH2470).

See Michelle Bean in Academic Advising (LaSalle 316), Becky Olstad, Faculty (Pence 321), or Colleen Mullins, Academic Director (LaSalle 341) for details, or email Colleen at cmullins@aii.edu for registration forms and tentative itinerary!

Minimum 2.5 GPA to participate in the program. Appeal letters for students falling below that level should accompany registration forms and deposits. Letters should describe the project you plan to undertake while in New Orleans. Deposits will NOT be cashed unless student is approved for entry.

You're Invited!

1853 Days Later: New Orleans Now

When we started our classes with students, seven weeks before the trip, we posed that they could pick any story. This program isn't about the rehashing of water-lined houses, or the still-present giant red spray painted X's on their sides. It's about an examination of one of America's great cities, and celebrating the culture, diversity, and daily life within. Katrina, we always tell students, needn't be covered, because she is in everything--eventually. Sometimes she rears her head easily--as in the work of Shelly Benson and her careful and thoughtful examination of Tennessee Street in the Lower 9th Ward, and at other times in more subtle ways, as in Krystal Hoover's work on the kids of Katrina--it turns out, kids will be kids. Fewer are the playgrounds, but joyful are their occupants.

During an interview Devin Meierding conducted on Thursday at Musician's Village, his subject said, "I want this to be a positive thing--no negatives--nothing about why I'm moving." And I thought to myself, as I'd thought many times this past week, "Why?" In her case it was, as I did a little digging on the internet, because non-disclosure agreements are being required in order that remediation of Chinese drywall installed in Musician's Village can take place (I imagine that's why). There are two sides to every story, some of those other sides will emerge as films and photo essays are refined in the coming weeks. But many won't. Pretty pictures are more desirable to paint.

Home is home was the enduring message across all projects this time. The marvelous fishermen of the fishing villages of Yscloskey and Delacroix (introduced in part of Adam Theis' film) teach us that, through their generations-deep traditions of crabbing, fishing, etc.

But I feel compelled to share a little reading material. Because for all the good and wonderful things, there are some that while smiling and sharing the greatest positivity, our subjects choose to omit. It's understandable. They just want us and our folks to know Greater New Orleans is a great place to visit. And it is. So do. But read the following, and know there is still so much to do:

On the musicians' plight - http://www.propublica.org/article/is-chinese-drywall-making-habitat-for-humanitys-houses-uninhabitable

On the BP educational effort - http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/in-outreach-to-schools-bp-and-noaa-dispel-myths-about-dispersants-subsurfac

In Case You Are Around Today or Tomorrow....

The menu

Day 7: Friday Dinner on Tennessee Street

We had a group last meal on Tennessee Street today courtesy of the Dupars. Most had catfish, some had chicken, and one had a stuffed pepper...all provided with copious sides of green peas, macaroni and cheese, and potato salad. Yum!

Nobody wants to go home....

One will be in trouble when she gets there...

A View From Days Six and Seven

Dinner at Franky & Johnny's after the sunset shoot at The Chalmette Battleground (Day 5)

2010 New Orleans Nine list occupant, the home of Professor Longhair (Day 6)

Peach awaiting fried chicken at Willie Mae's (Day 6)

(Above) The Departed; St Bartholomew's Cemetery; Algier's Point. (Below) House of Mirrors; KK Projects; St. Roch (Day 7)