This is how Hurricane Katrina transformed one photographer's works of art - and life

Before Hurricane Katrina, Brian Nolan, a professional photographer who lived in the Lakeview section of New Orleans with his wife, says the levy that broke was one that they crossed routinely. Also, before the hurricane, he never planned to create the images he calls “residuals,” featured on his Web site.

After the floodwaters subsided and the couple was allowed to return to their property, Nolan says he found his fine-art photography, stored as a collection of transparencies, virtually destroyed. Their home, seven feet below sea level, had been flooded.

But, Nolan says, instead of trashing the whole collection, he decided to check slide by slide to see if any could be saved.

When he did so, he discovered eerily beautiful images rendered by the floodwater floating the emulsions.

Nolan rephotographed the transfigured images and committed them to paper, to create a gallery of artwork. Nolan provides an account of the Katrina experience that ultimately led the couple to Marion ...

“We owned a single story brick ranch house on Mouton Street. We put a lot of work into the house, inside and out. I just finished fencing our property with a wrought iron fence that I had spent months cutting, drilling and welding from raw steel bought from a shipyard.”

“When we first saw news reports about the approaching storm, we prepared the house and property — boarding up windows and doors and packing away everything loose in the yard.”

Nolan says he thought about staying to ride out the storm. The year before the couple had evacuated with all their pets, an ordeal. “Despite the best laid plans for evacuations, traffic basically comes to a standstill. It took us 18 hours to travel what normally would have taken an hour,” he recounts.

So the couple packed their cars on the Sunday before Katrina made landfall, packing cats, dogs, and enough clothing for three days.

Again, the evacuation for Katrina was horrible. And the couple  stood in traffic 60 miles north of New Orleans while the first fingers of the storm approached. “We watched rain fly by our windshield horizontally,” he says.

Cell phones kept us in touch with family members up North who were monitoring the storm’s location ... As the day turned into night we slowly made our way north and west. When we were turned away from the Red Cross shelter in northern Louisiana, we went to a state park just south of Monroe, La. We ended up living in the state park for three months. It was a tough time.

“We had no idea how bad it was in New Orleans until we were finally permitted to return to our home a month later.” Nolan said the first trip to New Orleans was simply shocking. “There’s that scene in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ where Dorothy steps out of black and white film into Technicolor ...” he says, “Well, reverse that.”

The first time we crossed into our neighborhood, he says, everything was dead and covered in brown. The air was almost unbreathable. We had to climb through a window to move debris away from the door just to get in.

Everything in the home was destroyed and the house sat in 11 feet of water for nearly a month. The ceiling had collapsed, bringing with it the attic’s insulation — everything was covered in pink insulation, he says.

“Because of black mold, asbestos and backed-up sewage, we had to wear white plastic suits and respirators when in the home. We recovered what we could and returned to the state park.”

Nolan says it was six months before FEMA delivered a trailer to the property, and by that time they had moved to Marion. His wife works for Blumenthal Printworks. After the hurricane, a building in Florence was opened to house the Blumenthal employees displaced by the storm.

“My wife went there while I stayed in the state park with our animals,” he says.

“We decided to move here rather than return to New Orleans. We saw that New Orleans was crippled. Soil samples taken from our property came back with high levels of contaminants. It just made sense to put New Orleans on hold for awhile and move on with our lives in Marion.” After FEMA delivered the trailer, Nolan traveled to New Orleans to recover more possessions, salvaged what he could, and then oversaw the demolition.

“It’s a strange thing to see your home reduced to rubble in less than an hour. The demolition company hauled off everything that comprised our house — leaving behind just an empty lot.”

Initially, they hoped to rebuild in New Orleans ... “Over time, that dream faded. We read online news that living conditions there were going from bad to worse. As much as we loved the city’s charm, putting ourselves in harm’s way again isn’t something we want to do ...”

Nolan says it’s hard to explain what it feels like to have lost everything. “It reduces you to simply who you are within.”

Nolan says what he learned is despite the best of intentions, the government shouldn’t be counted on to do everything. The people who truly made a difference were the simple people who acted from a call from their heart.

“ ... A woman showed up the first day (in the state park) and started making ice tea. Two meals a day she was there handing out glasses of ice tea (sweet and unsweet). That simple act of showing up to hand someone in need of a glass of ice tea helped me realize that people still care,” he says.

Experiencing what it meant to have volunteers reach out to them has made the couple more aware of how important it is to not just stand by, but to take action when situation warrants it, Nolan says. Their love of animals led to their involvement with Paws to the Rescue.

The Nolans share their home with four cats and two dogs, all rescued before coming to Marion, and they are providing a foster home for other animals taken from the Marion County Animal Shelter.

Of life in Marion, Nolan says, “We’ve come a long way to get here. We lived in New York City for 15 years before moving to New Orleans. I’m a professional photographer; my wife is a textile designer. Since moving to Marion I have been renovating this home and shooting more stock images around Marion. I absolutely love it here. There’s something wonderful about walking into Baxley’s Hardware and feeling at home ... I recently received a certificate ... declaring me an official Southerner (I had to renounce my Yankee heritage). I’ve discovered Shulers BBQ and simply can’t get enough of it.”

... The serenity of the place helped us get through the confusion of dealing with FEMA and the Red Cross. (I still keep in touch with the park; every Aug. 25, I reserve cabin #11.)