Photographic memories

“I felt like a woman possessed,” Natalie Kaufman (Foreign Affairs ’90) says of her practically split-second decision to travel to rural Louisiana last December.

After seeing a television report about the ongoing efforts to right what Hurricane Rita had wronged in that part of the country, she realized that she, like many people, had long ago forgotten about the devastation left in the wake of the smaller hurricane that came just after Katrina. Upon discovering that life in the affected areas was still so far from normal, and in spite of the fact that she had never done anything similar before, she knew she had to act. 

“I don’t really have a rational explanation,” she says now. “I just felt angry and fired up.”

Kaufman found a list of volunteer charities doing work in the area on the CNN website and emailed several to offer her services. “I said ‘I want to come down, I have some free time over the holidays, I’ll push a broom, I’ll pick up trash, I’ll do anything.”

She ended up making contact with Southern Mutual Help, whose staff had something different in mind for Kaufman’s visit than just manual labor. “They asked, ‘By any chance do you have writing skills?’” When she told them she was a professional advertising and magazine writer, they asked her to come down to Louisiana and document what she saw so they could use it as content for their website. Kaufman, a long-time amateur photographer, brought her camera along, too, leaving behind the festive season for a more somber but ultimately incredibly gratifying new year.

Over the course of her 10 days in Louisiana, she talked to locals and other volunteers, documenting the scene along the way, and realized that writing content for a website wasn’t nearly enough. “I thought, ‘There has to be more here, more I can do to spread the word,’” she recalls. “I came back determined to find a way.

“When I got home I started cold calling. I’d never done anything like this before. I called a gallery and asked if she would consider donating the space for a show like this and she said yes. I contacted one of the best [photographic] printers in the city and they said yes. Every time I expected someone to say no they said yes.”

The result was a benefit show in New York last February that featured Kaufman’s photos as well as text she wrote telling the story of the place that had changed her so much and the people who live there. The evening raised more than $2,500 for Southern Mutual Help (an amount that was then matched by a private foundation) and it also provided Kaufman with a new sense of what might be possible.

Her next hope is that a publisher will put out a book of her photos and text so that an even larger audience will become aware of how much still needs to be done.

As for the work itself, Kaufman’s favorite photo is of Pops and Barbara Saucier, a couple in their 60s who lost everything in the storm. They face her lens with defiant pride shot through with weary sorrow.

“I captured what I wanted to capture,” she says of this picture in particular. “The harshness that has filled these people’s lives for so long — that seems so difficult to believe that it’s happening in our country.”

She pauses for a moment. “We’re a very rich country. There’s no excuse for what’s going on.”