Events

Please join us for a book signing with photographer John Woodin featuring his amazing book CITY OF MEMORY: New Orleans Before and After Katrina. One year before Hurricane Katrina flooded his childhood home, photographer John Woodin returned to the city that shaped his life. Led by intuition and fading memories, Woodin wandered the neighborhoods of his youth and photographed the architecture of the working poor, documenting the conflict between order and chaos, the effects of poverty and neglect, and the incongruous beauty of decay. The day after the search for Katrina’s victims was abandoned, Woodin returned to the same locations he had photographed the year before. Most of the visual landmarks he had relied on were altered or missing, and the neighborhood where he grew up was barely recognizable. Pairing photos of pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Woodin creates a document of the changes resulting from that natural disaster. City of Memory is a vitally important contribution to post-Katrina literature, but more universally it is a poignant essay about both perceptible and imperceptible change. —Sandy Sorlien, author of Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road Dauphine Street 2004, 2005, 2008 John Woodin was born in New Orleans and lived in Gentilly for twenty-five years. He has been a working commercial and fine-art photographer for more than twenty years. Woodin currently teaches photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.   He continues to photograph his original New Orleans subjects and neighborhoods, keeping the story current