Day 1-It's 3 a.m., my brother Scott, a prominent physician from Sacramento, and I sit in the bleacher seats at Reed Green Coliseum in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, now converted into a Red Cross shelter, the day following Hurricane Katrina's landfall. We are both wearing hospital scrubs-Scott because he was the lone medical staff that evening-and me because it was 105 degrees and the scrubs were light-weight, providing me with big pockets to carry film and other photo gear.
We both sported red eyes and black circles at that hour, almost asleep as we heard a woman's voice say "My ankles are swelling and I am going to have a baby." Scott immediately lifted his head, his voice piercing the silence with medical advice. The pregnant woman interrupted..."I don't want to talk to you...I want to talk to the real doctor" as she glared at me. While not a doctor-I am a bit older, a bit grayer, and a bit fatter than my brother and looked the part of Marcus Welby. At that moment I knew I was not in Kansas anymore and the Humane Society in Oz had taken Toto hostage.
So began my journey into a world tipped on its side, by the shear force of a vicious storm named Katrina.
I have been making photographs for the better part of 35 years, but nothing prepared me for the contextual juxtaposition of everything that an evolved society would consider normal, reasonable, and customary. I was dropped into a world that for many was hell, and for others who wished they had been fortunate enough to only be in hell. Lives, families, property, transportation, livestock, highways and water were inhaled without discrimination and purged back to earth as oatmeal.
An egalitarian and democratic storm it was.
3C
Silent Witness is a body of work that chronicles my time in Mississippi volunteering as a Red Cross photographer responsible for seven counties. While we have been deluged with thousands of images by the press corps documenting the suffering, loss, looting, emotions and chaos surrounding the impact of Katrina-most of the coverage has focused on New Orleans and Louisiana. However, the devastation on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi was horrific, not to minimize the loss of life and possession in Louisiana, but this story is centered in Mississippi.
As a fine art photographer, my work has centered on the notion of light as a noun and texture as an adjective. My images have been called quiet, sparse, reductionist, layered, symmetrical, organic and Zen-like. A disparate body of work constructed over the last 15 years, articulates my notions of aloneness, and connectedness.
It often is the result of my looking where something is not, that I often find something will be.
The overlay of my aesthetic on the real trauma and distress of a world, in both visual and visceral chaos, provided the fodder to explore a different kind of image that could only be gleaned from a theme-based project. My hope is that Silent Witness illuminates the incredible, often eerie, odd moments in time, where nothing was as expected, and expectations were often exceeded by the most passionate and kind human beings that are truly the real heroes in the ongoing drama of Katrina.
The hardened veneer of this lifelong skeptic was finally exchanged for a new model-complete with quieter voice, excessive humility and enough reverence to forever restore my faith in the human spirit .........
Witnessed entirely through the eye of a hurricane.
Keith Fishman
Santa Barbara, California
2006
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