Backstory: Hurricane Stories, Jon Bregel

When Jon Bregel of Baltimore, Maryland, first received a phone call from his Aunt in New Orleans, packed his camera, and headed south to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he had no idea that his collection of Gulf Coast photography would receive a national silver award in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of 2006. At the time, it seemed less a creative opportunity and more a moral imperative.

“I had no idea how bad it was down there. No words or pictures can really describe it. It made me more aware of the power of first-person experience,” Jon says of his time in New Orleans immediately following the hurricane. He wanted his work to come as close to that experience as possible: “People need to know what’s going on. [My work is] documentation, it’s not really intended for the people who were there.” But for the many people affected by the hurricanes who will be viewing his work in the online gallery and at the two southern museums, “It will remind them of their own reality,” Jon said carefully. “How real it was, and is still.” He hopes that his art will inspire reconstructive work.

The work itself is rather unconventional: almost all of his photographs involve text, and not text that he added, but rather signage, graffiti tags, and printed warnings already present in the framed scene. “The series had to do with communication,” explained Jon. With an experience this devastating and multidimensional, “you need as many layers of communication as possible in order to bring the art out into the third dimension.”

It was this desire to replicate the complexities of first person experience that drove Jon to push beyond photography and make a film. He had never picked up a video camera before, but he ended up developing a sophisticated documentary project based on interviews with local survivors. “It was very spontaneous, very freeform. It was my first video,” says Jon, “At the time, it seemed necessary.”

Jon returned to New Orleans in May for a cousin’s wedding, and was shocked by the devastation that remained. “We went through an entire 10 mile region that still looked like a graveyard. There was a house that had been swept off of its foundations still sitting in the middle of the street.” Jon believes that closely documenting—artistically and otherwise—the reconstruction process will hold the nation accountable to the vision of a rehabilitated New Orleans.

—Jon Bregel, Age 17, Baltimore, Maryland