SIX FLAGS AMUSEMENT PARK

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA 2003–2005

Six Flags in New Orleans, formerly known as Jazzland, unfortunately operated for only a few years before a life-changing event that sent shockwaves across a nation and devastated the landscape of New Orleans forever, a catastrophic hurricane named Katrina.

I first entered New Orleans in 2015 after being hired by the Guardian newspaper to document the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I worked alongside the original FEMA responders for that project and met many survivors of that horrific storm. I was hired to document the hardest-hit areas of New Orleans, which was the Lower Ninth Ward. I also thought documenting the abandoned Six Flags amusement park would be a dramatic way to further show the amount of devastation of the area, and it worked. My images of the abandoned park went viral and fueled the other images that I took of the Lower Ninth Ward, as it cast awareness on all that still needed to be done in New Orleans since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city.

Perhaps at no other time in modern history has the US government been criticized so harshly at local, state, and even federal levels. The complete incompetence of the state and federal government to handle the storm before and during Hurricane Katrina reached enormous proportions, even compelling rap artist Kanye West to infamously lash out on a live television fundraising event that the current president at the time, George W. Bush, didn’t care about black people.

I realized my images of New Orleans and the abandoned Six Flags park would test America’s resilience once again by opening up old wounds, and my images did just that. After the images went viral, I did several television news appearances where I talked about the issues still facing New Orleans a decade after most Americans had forgotten about it.