Anniversaries of disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, are important, because they help gauge what’s been learned and what progress has been made. They allow people an opportunity to grieve. But just as often, anniversary coverage overlooks the most important detail that inevitably comes up in a humanitarian situation—peoples’ resilience.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, I had been living in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighbourhood for two months. Long enough to know where to drink a beer, and where to go for a pick-up game of soccer on the weekend. Not long enough to have any kind of relationship with my new community, which since 1939 has been home to the Red Hook Houses — with more than 6,500 residents, Brooklyn’s largest public housing development.
I went to higher ground the night of the storm, and luckily returned a day later to an apartment with power and running water. Van Brunt Street, the main avenue in Red Hook, had flooded, water logging the building blocks of what made this area “up and coming”— a wine store, a lobster shack and a Fairway, among other places that real estate agents describe as “amenities.”
The tide also rose up and took out power in much of the public housing area, a few blocks away. With no heat or electricity, residents began lining up in a local park for warm meals and other assistance. I interviewed my neighbours that week, making return trips to one of the high rises that had gone dark. I chatted with residents who were using flashlights to guide them up 14 flights of stairs with buckets of water, simply to flush toilets.
Some people hadn’t showered in more than a week; many used the only basic resource available, natural gas, to boil water to heat apartments. Whole families slept huddled on communal mattresses at night. The evenings were lit by the NYPD, which had set up floodlights powered by generators. The goal was to create safe pathways and ward off any opportunistic would-be criminals. I spoke to one local who was born and raised here, and had never lived anywhere else. He sat on his couch in the dark listening to a battery-powered radio for news relevant to his situation. I’d seen these sorts of scenarios before, but in earthquake regions in South America, civil wars in South Asia and slums in Africa. Not in my own neighbourhood, not down the street.
As a reporter, it’s hard not to lose oneself in the competitive nature of the craft, the narrow vision of getting the story out fast and furious. Having spent time in disaster situations, I also know the importance of remembering that people aren’t the sums of their situation. Haitians aren’t simply earthquake victims, New Orleanians aren’t just flood survivors. The media often forget that in their hurry to cover and sensationalise tragedy.
With this in mind, I invited my colleagues, photographers Nabil Rahman and Elizabeth Rush, to help me set up an impromptu photo booth on a cold November night. We posted flyers around the public housing complex the day before, inviting people to stop by a nearby basketball court if they were interested in getting their portrait taken. We chose that spot because it was illuminated from the correct angle by the police floodlights, taking what was intended to be a precautionary device, and making it into a more positive one.
We set up a table with hot cider to stave off the chill, and little by little, over three hours, around 20 participants came by to strut their stuff, and have a little fun at a time when joy was in short order. Our original goal was to simply give something back, something journalists all too often forget. (We simply show up, take anecdotes and emotions from a community, and then we’re gone.) Everybody who had their photo taken received a portrait in time for the holidays. We didn’t plan on sharing these pictures with an outside audience. But with the Sandy anniversary, we wanted to remind people that disasters are not simply about suffering. They are about people finding a way to have a life, regardless of the circumstances.
Here’s what we saw through the lens...
