The Tivoli Series

I live in the land of Hurricane Katrina. We are into our third year of recovery, but our land will never be the same. I did my share of taking Katrina photos that documented the devastation and the ruination of people's homes and lives. I felt compelled to do so , in a way, to document an awful moment in time. Those were photos. They were snapshots. They stand as a reminder of the awful force of Mother Nature and her profound affect on people and the land.
I have shown and sold only a few of these photos, as they are not reminders that people around here want to see on a daily basis.

I also took my share of photographs, which are more artistic than photos. One subject was Katrina Sunflowers. Many artists painted or shot the mysterious Katrina Sunflowers that miraculously appeared in the months after Katrina in the spring of 2006. They were our first signs of hope. They sprang up on vacant lots, in back and front yards, on roadsides - everywhere. To this day, sunflowers are revered on the Gulf Coast.

I also was very privileged to be able to go into a dying old hotel, The Tivole, and take some one-of-a-kind photographs. Now those are fine art. The hotel had seen better days before Katrina, and was considered an eyesore by some, although she was solid and proud and one of our historic landmarks. She could have been saved and refurbished into something nice.
It had been closed for a number of years, and rumor had it that the homeless lived inside. But, oh, the stories she could tell of the roaring twenties and thirties when she was considered the Grande Dame of hotels on the Riviera of the South.
I first went inside the hotel with a group of people taking a photography workshop from Bruce Barnbaum. A few months later I sent inside for the last time with my son, who is a photographer (a fantastic one, too) and who was visiting from Colorado. We shot photographs on all five floors in the light of the late afternoon sun. It was an awesome experience. A week later,the wrecking ball demolished it because developers wanted to build a casino on the property. The front corner had been struck by a huge casino barge and torn off, leaving the building damaged. In my opinion, it could have been saved and turned in to a hotel once again. The good citizens of Biloxi fought to keep a casino from going on the property, and we won. It is sad that they didn't wait before tearing down one of our memorable landmarks, of which there are too few left.

You can read about the Grande Dame at the bottom of my photography page and view more Tivoli photographs:

The Tivoli Series

Most of my Tivoli photographs are artistic in nature, and they are among my favorites
of all of my photographs. They stand for a by-gone time long gone, the romantic past, out lost landmarks, and for"could haves" and "what if''s" and "never agains". They represent our past, and for people of the Gulf Coast, memories and photographs are all that we have left.