Look and Leave
Photographs and Stories from New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward

Jane Fulton Alt

Post-Katrina stories and photographs

Reviews

"In Look and Leave, Jane Fulton Alt turns the human heart into a shutter lens. Her photographs and stories of the men, women, and families brought into New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward for a first look at the ruin and spoil of their homes is a pointed, quiet celebration of worthy lives, unbowed by devastation. These pictures will stay inside your heart and remind you how photographs can be, as a little girl sings through her surgical mask, 'This little light of mine.'"
—Scott Simon, National Public Radio

"The most photogenic disaster in American history since the Civil War was met by photographers with an averted gaze, precisely because it was so photogenic. Alt realized, however, that photogeny is destiny, and she photographed the catastrophe the way it called for: photogenically. Brilliant head-on gazes at what was crying out there gave her camera a direct pass into the underworld of tragic beauty that was the storm. The pictures are the Destroyer’s official portraits."
—Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess


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Description
As a participant in New Orleans’s “Look and Leave” program, Jane Fulton Alt accompanied Lower Ninth Ward residents back to their homes for the first time since fleeing Hurricane Katrina. Alt’s photographs and stories reflect the intense drama of the epic loss this community endured while highlighting lasting hope and inspiration. It is through Alt’s social worker’s compassion and keen photographer’s eye that we are given a better understanding of what it meant to be a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina.
Series/imprint:
Center Books on the American South

Distributed for the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago

Page count: 96 pp.
Illustrated
Trim size: 9.5 x 9

Cloth
List price: $49.95
978-1-930066-90-8
9/25/2009
  

Paper
List price: $29.95
978-1-930066-91-5
9/25/2009

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Jane Fulton Alt began actively exploring the visual arts while pursuing her career as a clinical social worker. She has studied art and photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and the Evanston Art Center, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work can be found in many permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Yale University's Beinecke Library. Find out more about Alt and her work at www.janefultonalt.com.