katrina backyard memories

• Prize
• Photographer
  Alice Pedroletti, Italy
• Date of Photograph
  online
• Website
  http://www.notalike.com

KATRINA BACKYARD MEMORIES
Shot in the Delta Area, New Orleans (LA), July 2010.

Katrina came here in 2005.
5 years ago.
I donâ??t know how New Orleans and the rest of the coast was before that.
Some of the people who Iâ??ve met told me: â??We just want to forgetâ??.

â??Iâ??d like to make survivorsâ?? portraits,â?? I thought.

Humans have this kind of strange curiosity around disaster.
I too I have this.
I had to just see, to search for something.
How is it to be a survivor?
I feel like a survivor too sometimes, but I talk about emotions.
Not hurricanes.
I felt guilty because I was pretending to understand them. I came to understand Nature. I thought maybe these people shouldnâ??t be here. I came to understand Katrina.

Going to the delta, I saw many back and sideyards around houses.
Their centers were just ruins.
I discovered a house cemetery, from the New Orleans suburbs to the delta.
How can someone forget, keeping in his garden parts of a old life destroyed by Katrina?
Maybe these people donâ??t need to forget, they have already started living again.

These are my survivorsâ?? portraits.

• Biography
  I am a conceptual visual artist. I use photography and installation. My art research is based on the relationship between human being, environment, emotions and time. Images as ways to understand and express reality: the fusion between people, objects and places and the flat perspectives in my photographs, they help me to build a still-reality where emotions are cold and perfect. Single images, where a single story can be discovered, or sequences of images where a concept can be well-explained. I try to use photography to communicate, as a language. I've made work and personal experiences traveling around (USA, France, Great Britain) working as self-taught photographer or on assignments. I'm born and grown-up in Milan where I still live and work as photographer (commercial and art projects). I've worked also, for five years and after a EU special degree, as production assistant of cultural events (organization of exhibition, contest, music events, press office) especially to practice languages that I've studied at school (English, Spanish, French) and to understand how is working with different people in different life situations.