One block

A new Orleans Neighbourhoood Rebuilds

One Block follows the reconstruction of a single New Orleans block from 2006 to 2010 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, delivering a powerful portrait of the storm’s ongoing physical and psychological impact on the city and its residents. Using portraiture, still lifes, and abstract images, Dave Anderson documents the evolution of both the street and its houses as residents rebuild, exploring the very nature of community while testing its resilience.

Anderson’s compassionate treatment of the neighborhood’s straitened financial circumstances has drawn comparisons to coverage of the Great Depression by Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration–funded photographers. Seventy years later, between the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina and the current housing crisis, the stability and permanence of the American home are once again in jeopardy. Yet, is an extension of Anderson’s optimistic belief that the good within each of us is what unites us, as well as his hope that this commonality will afford us the grace to both endure and emerge from our current turmoil.

Dave Anderson has been recognized as “one of the shooting stars of the American photo scene” by Germany’s fotoMAGAZIN and named a “Rising Star” by Photo District News. His project Rough Beauty was the winner of Center’s 2005 National Project Competition and was published with an essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker. Vince Aletti of the New Yorker has called his work “as clear-eyed and unsentimental as it is soulful and sympathetic.”

Anderson’s work has been featured in magazines from Esquire to Stern and can be found in the collections of prominent museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.