Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun's Katrina-Damaged Photographs Transform into Right to Return Series

New Orleans photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun have documented their city for over four decades, focusing on Louisiana cultural traditions and community life in the Ninth Ward. Their work captures Black church services, jazz funerals, sugarcane field laborers, and dockworkers. In 2004, they extended this documentation to inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed their neighborhood and flooded their photographic archive, which they had stored in plastic bins. Initially discarding damaged work, they preserved some negatives by freezing them. Five years later, upon retrieving these frozen negatives, they discovered that water damage had created abstract effects with leaked colors and cracks on Kodachrome film. This transformation led them to experiment with printing the images, resulting in the series initially titled Damaged and now known as Right to Return. The photographers describe the original images as full of joyful people, rhythms, and celebrations, with the transformed works retaining energy and spirit through vibrant colors. Fifteen years after Katrina, the Ninth Ward faces the COVID-19 pandemic, with McCormick and Calhoun documenting their community's resilience through trauma and hurricane threats. They founded the L9 Center for the Arts in 2007, running arts programs and photography workshops for youth in the Lower Ninth Ward. In 2021, they received the Southern Prize and State Fellowship.