Award-winning photographer David Rae Morris will present “Willie and Katrina” at the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi July 9 to Aug. 4.
The first half of the exhibit, “Willie Morris in Oxford,” is a series of portraits he took of his late father, the noted writer Willie Morris, in the early 1980s. The second half, “The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” is a sample of Morris’ extensive coverage of the storm and the resulting tragedy that has befallen his adopted city of New Orleans.
Although he evacuated the city two days before Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005, Morris returned almost immediately, first to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and then into New Orleans in early September.
“The only way for me to make any sense of what had happened, was to throw myself into my work,” Morris said. “New Orleanians are a very resilient bunch. The designers of the levees and flood walls failed us, the federal government has failed us, and our local leaders have failed us. We are truly on our own.”
An exhibition of portraits of his father was already on the schedule at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans for the Spring of 2006 when Katrina struck.After almost two years of non-stop coverage of the aftermath of the storm, Morris turned his attention back to the portraits of his father. The majority of the 25 black and white photographs, were made between 1980 and 1985.
“I’m moving from one emotional mine field to another,” he said. “There’s a lot going on in these photographs. My father had returned home to live in Mississippi after almost 30 years in self-imposed exile, and I was in college and still trying to determine my own direction as a photographer.”
At the same time, his relationship with his father was also undergoing a transformation.
“As a young man in my early 20s, I was trying to establish my own independence and I often used the camera as a way of setting new boundaries,” he said.
The images range from his father’s walks with his beloved black Lab, Pete, behind William Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, to driving in the country, to staying up late with friends at his new house at 16 Faculty Row on the Ole Miss Campus.
A reception will be held July 26, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. An expanded exhibit of the Morris’ portraits of his father entitled “Letters From My Father,” will open at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans October 6th, and continue through December 2007.
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| Willie Morris from North Toward Home |
To see one image, go to: WilliePete.jpg.
Willie Morris and The Southerner magazine
When Southern American writer Willie Morris died on Aug. 2, 1999, at the age of 64, I was the editor and publisher of a new online magazine called The Southerner at Southerner.Net. We put out a special issue on Morris with some of the top writers in the country weighing in on this special character in Southern literary history.
This was the first attempt in the world, as far as we know, to develop a Website that tried to live up to certain standards of a print magazine, down to a cover photo and printable content. The style of it seems sort of antiquated now, although it is an interesting look at the early days of the Web. We even had maybe the first audio file ever linked from a Website, an interview I did with author Gay Talese. You can still listen to it.
If you don’t know who Willie Morris is, here’s one way to find out.