Bill Daniel, "Katrina Dust"

By Christian Bruno

In the mad months following the devastation, filmmaker Bill Daniel perched his 8×10 still camera atop his modified Chevy van in New Orleans to capture the Lower Ninth Ward tumbled irreparably into the new millennium. A neighborhood once boasting the largest concentration of African American homeownership now featured upended Cutlass Supremes, twisted chain link fences, and radiating cinder blocks.

The resulting large-scale prints, five of which were on display at Artist Television Access last week as “Katrina Dust,” are part reportage, part classic landscape portraiture. Daniel has mucked with the fine-grain details of the large format negatives through improvisational manipulation in the printing stage, adding a sense of tension to the haunted scenes.

Prior to Katrina, Bill Daniel had been working on a series of pieces examining the peak-oil crisis, setting up shop in Shreveport, Lousinana, a city spending most of the 20th century slow-dying since its own oil peak in the ’20s. This month finds the ever-itinerant film and photo artist in his other hometown, San Francisco, for recent Red Vic Movie House screenings of “Who is Bozo Texino?” his hand-crafted film essay on wanderlust along American rails.

In between developing prints over at RayKo Photo, I had Bill Daniel describe one of the “Katrina Dust” photos.

“One reason I used 8X10 is because I wanted all this detail, I wanted all this richness. It carried a lot of information. But also the contrast is blown off the scale in a lot of areas. I am working on de-tuning the enlarger so the light comes out of it kind of crooked. I love the form of houses. They’re almost a glyphic or a symbol of domestic protection, or security. A rectangle with a triangle on top of it means ‘safety.’ The fact that the landscape is littered with these symbols of domestic security or safety, and they are completely wrecked and tumbled around, is such a pure graphic representation. But if you look in the back, there is a ton of detail, you can see there are just upside down cars littered in the trees as far back as you can see. All the details, a little nightgown here, a little architectural design, and so many cinder blocks. I was working really fast. I was just shooting stills for two days, because I was also doing relief work with Common Ground. I am not into titles. Just dates and numbers and place. You know, basically, I am just recording, I just want to get the facts. The title of this is ‘Lower Ninth Ward,’ and the date. If I had the street, that would be great. But it was hard to know what the streets were, because the signs were usually gone.”

04.05.2006