the chutry experiment

Thanks, Chuck. It's very nice of you to say this.

I think that image of the man sitting against the background of empty orange seats is visually powerful and certainly worthy of an aesthetic reading. And I know its aesthetic power is part of why it hits me so hard. But when I look at it and those other couple, I really do have a hard time interpreting them.

They've totally haunted me all day. There are all these weird levels of the alien and the familiar running through them--in some ways I connect now as a father, in some ways they connect to that part of my life which is itself in many ways alien to me now, and of course I am abundantly aware of the fact that I've never gone through anything like this and that even my experiences in hurricane shelters before weren't the same, not the least because I was white and not one of a hundred thousand-plus people going through it.

It's weird, you know. I've been touched and angered and worried and sad about the whole tragedy in the gulf states, and somewhere along the line a bit of my own childhood memories kind of floated up to the surface, and then I looked at those pictures today and all of this personal, gut-level connection washed over me. I have been a total wreck all day, to be honest.

I think there's a degree to which the photos tap into something almost incomprehensible for me, simply because I haven't experienced anything close to the kind of powerlessness that I see in these images, and your memories do provide another dimension to these images for me.

I struggled a lot with that entry because I'm also not sure what to say about the photos (I'm even having a hard time putting this comment together). I do think I'm less interested in the aesthetic reading than I am the affect of the image, and for some reason, that came out in the stark isolation that I associated with his being completly alone in the shot. In fact, it may be that I'm projecting some of my own fears or concerns onto the person in the photograph, leaving me to speculate about whether the storm separated him from his family or friends (hence my focus on his isolation).

I'm also struck by my own powerlessness to say anything to make things right (or even the limitations on what I can do to make things right) for everyone who has been affected by the storm.

It is really hard to say much of anything coherent about most of those photos. The three from that set that I pointed to, I felt like I had a way in to--they were on a scale I could begin to understand and say something about. I know as I was writing about them, especially that first one of the man and his daughter in the seats, I felt dumb at first writing that post, because I was aware that there were so many more horrifying, sadder, pictures or something. Like, how can this picture of a father and his daughter sitting in relative safety and comfort be the one that send me into tears? All those pictures of people sitting with bodies of loved ones nearby or sobbing as they find out everything they had is gone are touching, but somehow those didn't get to me in the same way.

And I think you're exactly right that it's impossible to try to say anything about those pictures without feeling the inadequacy of words, and given the scope of the storm, just total inadequacy.

Not sure I have anything to add, but KF's comments in this post, "On Never Feeling Like You've Done Enough," really gets at some of these issues.