After eight years, off-and-on, in persuit of a degree of higher education I'm now graduated! At long last I've done what at times I feared I'd never manage. I've acheived that little sheet of paper that validates me. Validate me! Yes, oh, validate me, oh, yes!!!

So the piece is done. The thesis orals and paper is over with. And while I really don't want anything more to do with this project, all is not over. The "fat lady ain't sung yet." There's still the exhibition to install for and then to take down... and one more week of classes to get through.

In addition to that, I guess a wrap-up of sorts is called for. But where do I start? The past few months have been a harrowing experience. It may take me a while to process my feelings and sentiments about this whole mess - something that I've already begun to detach myself from - but a few words are necessary.

I am glad that the thesis process is, barring my entry into grad-school, something I have no need to go through again. I realize that, in part, I'll be going through bits of this process over and over again in my practice as an artist. What I hope, though, is that I'll have the option to go through this creative process at a more relaxed pace. Cramming a major task such as this into the course of three busy months is not something I relished. True, there were nearly two additional months in there between project proposals in late November and the begining of earnest work in mid-to-late January, but I scrapped my proposal from the previous semester without the option to push back the deadline. I followed an imperative. However, I'm not a fan of working under pressure and this, at times, brought me near to throwing my hands in the air and walking away.

I'm not sure if there are any changes that could be made to the thesis process or program that would have made my journey from start to finish any easier, or at least any more fruitful. I appreciated the mid-term review and the opportunity to get feed-back from at least a small handful of artists from outside the PNCA environment. (Though I do wish there were at least one or two artists on my panel more familiar with my choosen medium of photography.) The feed-back was valuable if not fundamental to the eventual shape of my piece. Additionally, I sought a great deal of input both from outside as well as from within the PNCA community over the entirety of this last semester. This blog was part of that process.

Perhaps my greatest concern, apart from the stress of time constraints, which I wager are not uncommon - perhaps even expected - was my peculiar particularity of having a mentor who was, to a degree, personally and emotionally involved in the same matter I was seeking to process through. Morgan Walker, that said individual, also has roots and family in southern Louisiana. I don't remember all of the specifics, but knew enough to be aware of his own emotional involvement in the subject matter I was working with. This provided a degree of understanding and empathy which I wager was valuable to me as a human being coping with tragedy, but I have to wonder if it was the best arrangement for the creation of a successful piece to be exposed to the wider public. Might a mentor relationship with someone more emotionally removed from the mess of New Orleans post-Katrina have helped create a clearer body of work... Or was that relationship based around a mutual understanding of the emotional weight I was dealing with necessary to my ability to complete this thesis piece?

As far as the paper went, I'm glad it was not due until after orals. This is not just for the fact that it afforded me more time (even if only a week or so) to polish up the paper, but it also allowed me to make revisions based upon what came to me during the set-up and construction of my installation. During the final week prior to set-up and preperation for orals several items came to me which I felt were necessary to include in the final paper. And though I could have put them into an addendum after the body of the piece, I would not have been able to integrate them into the piece itself where I felt they more needed to be.

So, now we come to the exhibition...

I'm rippling with excitement about installing this piece again. It was a seven or eight hour job when I first did it. Even having worked through it once I still don't expect it to be any less than a six hour job. And somehow I need to figure out how to make sure that those prints stick to the walls for the entire course of the show. Those prints need to stay up for three weeks without coming undone, without bowing out, without slipping, without warping. Glue might be a last resort if I can bear to part witht the small prints and the masking tape just isn't cutting it.

That's next week, though... not now. I've done what I can to prepare for it. Now it's just grunt work and prepping.

- Art

I've got it! I've got a solid mock-up. Now I just need to reproduce this at twice the size with larger prints and color on the map.

It'll be an installation piece about 9 feet high and 10 feet wide.

The phrase that keeps coming to me in my head is "putting the pieces back together."

I'll start off with my dream from last night.

Morgan Walker (my thesis mentor) and Bob Martin (my thesis research and writing professor) were somehow combined as one person. It was the day of my thesis presentation. For whatever reason I was integrating a painted or white canvass into my project. The problem at hand, of course, was that my thesis was unfinished and that I had just gesso'd my canvas that morning. Walker-Morgan was unpleased to say the least...

That was pretty much it. Your standard anxiety dream, the alternative version of which is showing up for the final exam and not remembering a lick of what you're being tested on, or showing up for the board meeting without your notes or presentation.

Fortunately my thesis is not due today, or tomorrow, or next week... but it is due soon. With that in mind I bring you to what I hope is the pretty-much the final form of my thesis.

The above image is my new concept sketch. A few days ago I printed out all the satellite images I had downloaded in 3"x3" form, cut them out and began playing with them. I layed them out by neighborhood. I lined them up in grids. Then I began overlapping them and creating composites of larger views of New Orleans neighborhoods and regions.

I began seeing my hometown in ways I never had before. I began seeing old areas of town that I remembered from ground level. I began seeing the how one area related to another as I never knew they did. I began to see how close some parts of the city were to others when before they had seemed disparate and greatly seperated.

Familiar neighborhoods stuck out the most for me. Those areas that I had seen from the ground were the easiest for me to assemble and relate to. Neighborhoods which I had never been through held no draw for me whatsoever.

What I began to envision was a layout on the wall of these neighborhood composites. Before laying down these composites I would draw out an outline or map of the city in ink or pencil using a projector. I would put in major roads and appropriate bodies of water and city boundaries. Then I would laydown the multiple-image composites on top of these lines, only putting in those neighborhoods I has some familiarity with or that I had been through. This would leave sizable gaps and negative space of unfamilar or unknown territory.

After this first layer of images is layed down, I would somehow mark (whether with pen, bright string, black string, pins with codes or numbers attached or what, I don't know) physical links to prints of my own images. These images would, of course, need to be scaled down from the 24" high or wide format I'm printing at now. They may need to be reigned in not only for the sake of space but also for the sake of being paired with the smaller-scale satellite images.

The two things I'm going to have to overcome with this presentation are, one, the fact that it may be lop-sided in set-up, as I've got more worthwhile images from the east side of town than I do from the more affluent western side of town... and, two, the fact that in the eastern neighborhoods I cannot pin-point exactly where I was, location-wise, when I took a photo as I can in the western and more familar neighborhoods.

As a third and peripheral element I've considered running a time-line underneath the map (or along side it) that would mark out the last few months since Katrina in terms of my life and my experience, with links along the timeline to certain photos and images.

So, what do you think? Visually interesting? Conceptually interesting? Sparks curiosity?

I just need to figure how much space I'm going to have to put this work up on the wall. I can guess at the height, but not so much at how wide of a space I'm going to get. Additionally, I will have to present this piece twice - once during spring focus week infront of a panel and then again during the senior thesis exhibition. That will mean that I'll either have to come up with a way to quickly install and de-install, draw and then deconstruct or erase my map and all the images attached to it, or I'll have to print out my map and attach the scans to that.

Oh shitsky. How to get past that?

More later. I need to close down work, which I should have done twenty minutes ago.

Ooops.

So, one of the earliest things I come across in trying to create pieces based around tryptics composed of squares is that it forces me to consider reworking and recroping images that I felt were already sucessful. I have to take images that I had previously worked into interesting compositions as wide panoramas, carefully considered rectangles or tall, vertical prints and rework them into square formats - or simply not use them at all.

Then upon taking closer looks at the demographic and statistical maps of Orleans Parish I realize that they aren't composed of perfect squares either. In fact the only facets of the composition that are close to being square, aside from the few medium-format negatives I posess, are the satellite images.

Then I must consider whether tryptics whose constituent parts are of equal size are the best overall composition for my work. In such a format my work gets put on equal footing with the Census Bureau's statistics reprasented through an NGO's maps and NOAA's satellite images downloaded from a website. My images neither dominate nor are subserviant, but are the last that the viewer comes across in reading the piece from left to right (as most westerners do read things).

In alternate consideration I could choose to do away with the tryptics of three parts, each of identical size. Instead I could leave my images in their own particular form which I prefer them in at the moment and make the statistics and satellite images subordinant to them. This would force a variety of arangements of elements rather than a uniform and consistent set-up of the three parts.

The other issue that I'm finding myself having to deal with is that I only have five statistical maps - four for different ethnic make-ups and one for poverty rates. If I were to use one map per tryptic and not reuse any of the maps I could only create four or five tryptics. Additionally, if I am to pair, say, the map of white ethnic concentrations with a satellite image of a predominantly white neighborhood with a photograph of a house or street in that neighborhood I run into a problem beyond the white and african-american neighborhoods - I did not photograph much in what might be called predominantly hispanic or asian neighborhoods. (In truth there really are few if any predominantly hispanic or asian neighborhoods in New Orleans). If I were to reuse maps then I'd worry about being needlessly repetative.

Perhaps a solution would be to post all the data at one spot in the exhibit and create reference markers on those maps as to where photographs were taken...

This change would necessitate a shift in layout. Yet, could I maintain a uniformity or at least a unity within the work as a whole if I have varying layouts, aspect ratios, etc...

All these are ponderings for another day, after I've had some sleep.

I have got to learn to copy my blogs to the clipboard before attempting to post. There are few things more agrivating than attempting to post only to run up against a web page error and having it all lost somewhere into the ether.

So, here we go again.

I've admittedly been away for a little bit, due to a few intervening matters. First there was the initial draft of the thesis, done in twelve consecutive hours - long hours overnight, leading to the drowsy morning of my birthday. Then there was recovery. Then my father was in town until two days ago.

However, now I am back in thesis world. The image above is a concept sketch of what I have visualized as my out-put. Several of these tryptics will be built from what images and data I have and can find. In the mean time notes are being taken, research read through and photos fiddled with. More comments and blogs will be made in the coming days, but for now I'm done.

TTFN

So this is testament to how little I know about the neighborhood I was shooting in and have been trying to base my thesis around. All this time I've presumed it was the often touted Lower 9th or at least it was somewhere in the 9th Ward.

Wrong!

Apparently, after doing some research, looking at maps and comparing them to the vaguely remembered maps that guided me in my explorations on eastern New Orleans on that day or two of shooting that I'm pulling images from, the neighborhood I'm working with is actually either the St. Roche or St. Claude neighborhoods, or the Florida Area. I had never been to these neighborhoods before when there were people around, and in December there was nobody about to tell me where I was.

I don't have to drastically rewrite my thesis or approach because of this (mostly due to the fact that it's hardly started as is), but I do feel it might change the reception a little bit. The 9th Ward has been so often mentioned and talked about as the worst hit neighborhood, as the media's example of severe damage and a community torn apart. These other neighborhoods are rarely if ever mentioned, but are right next door to the Lower 9.

That having been said, St. Roche, St. Claude and Florida all have there own histories and stories and maybe I can find out what they are and how they fit into a sensible thesis.

Here we are again, another night, up later than I should be. But this is what I get for having a part-time job, thesis work and a liberal arts class all at the same time. At least I don't have to worry about long commutes.

I made four new prints today, three horizontal and one vertical, one of John Shaw Elementary, one of a pile of discarded televisons on a street corner, one of general disarray in a green space in front of houses and a fourth of a dusty street lined with once flooded cars and more tv's surrounding a fire hydrant.

So far I have eight prints - nine if you count one I shot at night, but I'm hesitant to include that one as it's the only one I've liked or felt able to use from night time, and it stands out. Composition seems good in all of them, but because I've taken image files that were never meant to be printed larger than 11" by 14" and have blown them up to anywhere from 24" by 24" to 24" by 55" the image quality gets a bit rough and pixilation is worse in some than others. I'm still not sure if this is something I want to overcome technically (because I like them big and don't want to print them small) or if it's something that I want to live with and maybe exaggerate somehow. I feel that clearer images might have a stronger initial visual impact, but with the slight resolution issues and pixelation there is a vague resemblence to video stills and a reference to media images. There is also an acknowledgement of the digital medium as well as of the circumstances under which I was shooting.

But these are all aesthetic issues. I don't feel as if I've, as of yet, locked down or isolated my thesis. I'm feeling less and less comfortable about tackelling race issues as a central topic, but still feel that I should say something about it in some way or another. After all, race issues were and are a central element to life in New Orleans. And especially since I'm presenting photographs of the 9th Ward, issues of ethnicity are something I can't get away from and it would be irresposible to ignore them.

I almost wish that I could use my thesis as a way to process all of my convoluted emotions about life in that city, but as per the nature of theses as I know them, I need to make some sort of statement or argument and back that up with research, rather than late-night meandering thoughts. If not, however, I would be happy if I could consider myself almost halfway done with my first draft.

I guess I would have to consider the postulation that a long-running history of rot and decay within New Orleans led to its quick and near-thorough destruction as one of the lead, if not the lead contender for my thesis statement at the moment. I feel reluctant, though, to grab on to that broad of a statement as my images are not so much from all quarters of the city, but rather (at least the ones I'm presenting) are of just the 9th Ward, only a fraction of the city's area.

I don't know... Again, it's late and I need to be up early to take my car in to the shop at 10 or 11am to have a tire replaced.

I hope the ground isn't covered in snow in the morning.

G'night folks, and I hope you've slept well.

More processing about my art... Aren't you excited? I know I am.

I've perhaps been avoiding this or perhaps haven't thought the need for this until now, when in desperation, I still find myself grasping for some solid footing in my thesis direction, less than a week before the first draft of my paper is due. "This" is me, alone with my laptop, sitting in the chilled, overly vented space of my Steven's Annex studio, Catherine's red shawl wrapped around my shoulders and surronded by over-sized prints of my shots of the lower 9th. "This" is me trying to eliminate the fluff, the confusion, trying to determine what I see infront of me and what this material is really about.

"This" seems like an insurmountable task... But "this" needs to be done. I'm running short on time.

So, what is important to me about New Orleans?
Oh, Jesus... It's my home, for Christ's sake! It's the palet from which I was painted.

How do I feel about it?
I love it and I hate it. I have so many mixed feelings about that city. It was so rich and colorful, thick and textured. Good music, unmatched for food, great architecture and full history. It always felt alive. There was always somewhere to go, at any hour of the day or night.

But it was also a dirty city. Streets were grimy, the air was thick with humidity and mold and smelled often of stale milk and rotting garbage. The government and all its facilities were corrupt and ineffective. Economically it was stagnant. Major companies left town because the schools were failing.

It was a city in decay long before Katrina ever made land fall. I've said this before. An analogy I may have not tried before was that the city itself was like an aging alcoholic, partying and drinking too much, never managing to make it to AA, never pulling itself out of the gutter enough to clean up, to be effective or even to pay all of its bills and debts. So much of the city's revenue was based on party tourism and nobody wanted to stay around to clean up after the parties. Life always seemed so flashy and lively to this alcoholic, but could that have been only so much self delusion?

Popular images of New Orleans all seem rooted in a shirking of responsibility: Mardi Gras, casinos, corrupt politicians and police officers. It was all escapism... from the dirty streets, the failing public schools, the crime, the drug problems, the poverty.

So where does race come into this whole mess? How does race play into the equation? Partly I feel that the plight of the African-American in New Orleans is in large degree due to the vestiges of history, of civil rights inequalities never tackled and overcome. Historically ethnic minorities in the United States (and frankly, everywhere in the world that I can think of) have only had the least desireable land made availalble to them. Even thought African-Americans may have not been minorities in southern Louisiana, by the numbers, they were still minorities in terms of power and rights, and, economically being the most disenfranchised, were rarely ever able to afford more than the lowest, most flood-prone land. Add to that a century or more of the worst of segregated education systems and then a few more decades of de-facto segregation in continually failing public schools and you get generations of poorly educated people with little opportunity for economic betterment. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if not a few of the graduates of New Orleans public schools were so ingrained in the culture of low-standards that they may have failed to realize that it could ever be any better.

Up until about a decade ago there used to be a quip within the public educational systems of Louisiana that went "Thank God for Mississippi." For years Mississippi kept Louisiana out of last place in so many nation-wide ratings, especially ratings of school systems. Within the past decade Mississippi has improved while Louisiana has gone no where but down.

Now where do my images come in here? What do I see in my images that have anything to do with this? What are the images I have about in relation to these problems?

The images I have of the 9th Ward are of the most damaged and devastated neighborhood. I see empty shells built upon poor infrastructure. I see the most thoroughly trashed homes, streets, sidewalks... But they are not the most damaged places because the wind was strongest there or because the flooding was worse there than in the other half of the city which was innundated. The 9th Ward is the worst off because it was the most neglected and least cared for. Not by its residents - no, to them it was home, community, friends and all. But to the outside... to those in the outside world... No one paid attention to life in the 9th Ward until there suddenly was no more life in the 9th Ward.

As a side note, I find it interesting that as recovery teams have swarmed into New Orleans, the teams that have established themselves there, made up of idealistic volunteers from all around the country and even from outside the States, are comprised of almost entirely caucasians in thier twenties and thirties. Few volunteers are African-Americans. Why is this?

Now where do I take this?

More to come tomorrow probably, but for now, it's late and I'm tired.

Mid-term thesis review was last Tuesday, but I've been a bit reluctant to start writing about it, wanting more to take my time to process the various bits and pieces of input I've received then and since. Or maybe it could be because if I started writing it would mean that I must begin eliminating options and narrowing down the direction I take on my thesis project.

The most vital thing I took away from what ended up being more along the lines of an hour-long chat session with my panelists seemed to be that what I really need to work on is figuring out what exactly I want to say before I try and say anything. That always feels like such a daunting task to me, but it feels especially so when running into a realm such as New Orleans post-Katrina. Such a disaster covers so many arenas of outrage and furor. How does a person pick one and not feel as if he or she is leaving behind so many vital and important words, comments, thoughts, screamed indignation?

There are many things I find myself wanting say to ask... Like "what did all those people die for, and was their death necessary? Why did no one listen to the warnings about the levees? Why was the federal support so slow in arriving and why is it still lagging behind? Why can't the "richest" and most technologically advanced nation in the world effectively coordinate relief efforts? Those schmucks in federal government have their priorities seriously out of order. Thank heavens for the relief workers. I still love that city, no matter what it's been through. And lastly, that city has been falling apart for decades now.

However, above all this there is one thought that was brought out in the review and that continues to remain prominent in my mind. It was something that stemmed from a comment I made about my own photographs of the 9th Ward to one of the panelists. I noted that before the hurricane, these were neighborhoods I would have never ventured into. The 9th Ward was always, in my mind, a place too dangerous for passing through. Yet now, after the storm, the devastation, the flooding and the evacuation, I could wander through these neighborhoods alone, day or night, and feel safe, albeit not considering the risks of environmental toxicity. One of the three reviewers noted that they felt there was a great deal of potential in this idea.

The tricky, sticky factor in this seemingly benign statement lies in the fact that this neighborhood that I, as a middle-class white, speak of was once a 95%+ poor and black district. These were places that, as a child growing up in New Orleans, I was taught a white person did not go in to - not alone, and especially not at night - unless you were looking to get mugged or shot. Now that it is almost entirely uninhabited, it's free of crime, free of danger... and free of the families that called it home. But how do I, as a white, middle-class male, bring up this fact andl the multi-headed hydra that are entangled in it and not get attacked as a raciist? Can I?

The racial segregation and crime issues seem to be the large elephant in the living room when it comes to the post-Katrina aftermath. It made a lot of headlines and noise early on when it came into the room. Some people were made pariahs for noting that crime levels had plummeted when population dropped. The elephant has blown its trunk a small hand-full of times and everybody seems to be aware of it. But everyone is more than eager to move on to some other topic of discussion or controversy - who knew what and when, funding issues, hotel evacuations, etc. - rather than discuss with any seriousness or intent, the role that race played in New Orleans life and in the way that events have unfolded since the storm first made landfall in late August, 2005.

Again, though, how this is received is important to me. What validity would I have in discussing the life or plight of the black man, woman, family in New Orleans when, as a child I had little to no african american friends - not because I disliked them, but because I rarely ever shared common space or experience with them in my daily life except in passing occurrences? That alone - that I could fail to have african americans in my regular daily experience while living in a city that was only one-quarter caucasian - should be a testament to the separateness of the two worlds in New Orleans. I want to approach these issues in a way that is respectable and not dismissible or (worst-case) inadvertently offensive. I would want to raise questions and get people to think rather than turn them off and turn them away...

Now maybe I still don't have my points and directions entirely narrowed down, but it's getting closer...