by Jon Lackman | 18 December 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the October 2007 Text and Performance Quarterly, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli contribute “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade“:
On February 25, 2006, the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana (SPLL) hosted the twenty-sixth Annual Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade in downtown Baton Rouge … The 2006 theme, FEMAture Evacuation, took direct aim at FEMA and other governmental agencies and their bungled response to Hurricanes Katrina and also Rita … In this essay … we chose to accentuate our viewing of the parade by ciphering it through the technical and conceptual apparatus of photography. Situating ourselves at separate locales along the parade route, we experienced the festivities through the view finders of our cameras, understanding that the artifice of making photographs would remind us of the constraints and possibilities of viewing; of finding (or, just as likely, stumbling upon) an image, framing and focusing it while always leaving something out. We chose, then, to be aware of making culture through our little optical boxes. Afterwards, the thousand plus photographs served as our primary source for asking how the parade performed its stories and, more precisely, how our photographs performed the parade. To discover answers to those questions, we wrote in photographic terms, guided first by the technical discourse and operations of photography and then, as they arose in the process of writing, theories and concepts too. While there is little doubt that our experiences and predilections enter and exceed the field of vision we write here, we tried to adhere to the challenge of writing about the parade through photography; it determined what we wrote about and how.
