The Open Door

When Hurricane Katrina had set a course directly for New Orleans, rather than heed the warnings to evacuate the city, my grandmother and uncle chose to stay in their home, just as they had done for the decades of storms that had come before this one.  As is now clear, this storm wasn’t anything like the others.  The stories that came out of the storm about the people sitting on their rooftops for days and about the conditions within the Super Dome once they were “rescued” from their homes, those stories were lived by my grandmother and uncle.

It took two years before their lives returned somewhat to normal.  Habitat for Humanity had provided them with a house in the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, in 2007, and it was there that my family and I traveled this past weekend to celebrate Mother’s Day with them and some other family members that had made the trip to see them and to meet our new baby boy.  When I was packing for the trip, I didn’t plan to take anything other than hand held snapshots of the family with the new baby, so I didn’t bring along my tripod and only took my everyday 50 mm f/1.8 lens.

Many of the homes on her street were created specifically to house those displaced by Katrina, however, directly across the street from where my grandmother lives is a house that was built in 1940 that probably should have been torn down during the same time period that hers and the other homes were being built.  It’s been abandoned for at least the three years that she’s lived in Ensley, and it certainly a potential haven for drug and gang activity.

The Backyard Barn

I’ve always been equally fascinated and terrified by the house on each visit to the area.  The front door stands eternally open.  Almost every window has been shattered.  Discarded furniture is strewn across the front porch.  There is graffiti on the brick walls.  In many ways, it looked as if it was ready to collapse on its own at any given moment.  Despite my fears and the protests of my family, I had to know to what was inside.

What follows after the jump is a sampling of some of the photos from within the house.  As I mentioned, each of these photos was taken hand held with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens.  As a result, I was only able to capture some of the finer details of the house and its destruction, such as Sunday’s POTW of the fireplace bricks.  I wasn’t able to capture the big picture as much as I would have liked to nor some of the house that didn’t have much sunlight.  If at all possible, I plan to do a much more elaborate shoot of the house on my next visit to Ensley.

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