Happy Saturday everyone - I don't think anyone here is a stranger to the kinds of images coming from Houston this week. People are talking about this storm and its impacts here. I have struggled through my shooting this week to try to find ways to illustrate just how complete and total the losses are. This was the personal goal I had set for myself. I hear the statistics - the homes destroyed, the rainfall that fell, the number of people in shelters. It's very difficult to find the words to adequately explain what it means to lose something that is irreplaceable. I had spoken of a story this week from my time in Hurricane Sandy in which a neighbor of mine had lost everything in his apartment to floodwaters. But the part that stuck out in the telling of the story, was not the TVs or the furniture, but rather the artwork that was the last connection he had to his wife that had passed away years before. They were totally destroyed and irreplaceable. It's with that lens that I had challenged myself this week to try to find a way to photograph what I was seeing in the context of the true loss that people were experiencing. This shot here is clearly about the furniture that has been flooded and is now on the yard waiting removal. However, it is possible that for these people that put these chairs out that they meant so much more. These could be the chairs that had their "spots" or the perfect armrest angle. These could have been the chairs they held their grandchildren for the first time. We have "things" and we say that they are replaceable, and this is, of course, very true in a literal sense. But when exploring the attachments we have to these "things" and the sentimental values we place on them in addition to the purchasing costs, the reality of the loss starts to become more clear. Photographing this is very difficult as is trying to picture this from afar. My challenge for you here is to see this image in terms of the title. This isn't furniture to the people who are now throwing it out - this could have been a life in chairs.
Houston, Texas - A Life in Chairs