Photography Book Review: ‘Coming Back New Orleans Resurgent’ by Mario Tama

Take a look through any set of photographs dealing with New Orleans in the past five years, and you’ll see a period of tremendous change for that city and its people. But enter the pages of Getty Images photographer Mario Tama’s book, and you’ll see a unique progression of destruction, recovery, renewal, and rebirth.

Tama’s book, Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent, was published in August 2010 on the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. This is Tama's first photo book and it was named one of five finalists in Pictures of the Year International's Best Photography Book Award of 2010.

What makes this book special, as is often the case with good photographs, is the story behind the work. In the course of five years between Hurricane Katrina and the last image in his book, Tama visited New Orleans about 15 times, producing at least 3,000 images that are now housed in the Getty Images database.

“I wanted to give a visual representation of the process of people returning and the city rising from the ashes,” said Tama during an interview about his book in New York last month. As a photographer, a human being, and an artist of the lens, Tama achieves his aim, but perhaps not exactly in the way he intended.

The message that comes through the images isn't a linear communication of the progression of gradual renewed stability and restoration of the character of the city and its people. Instead, what is conveyed is a subtle thread of a people so spirited and unique that even America’s most destructive modern natural disaster could not break them.

Tama himself notes in the book’s statement that there is simply something very different about New Orleans and its inhabitants.

“Perhaps the might of the New Orleanians has something to do with their history,” writes Tama. “While New Orleans may be known as the Big Easy, the lives of its inhabitants have often been anything but. They have suffered wars, storms, slavery, epidemics of yellow fever and cholera, fires, riots, segregation, illiteracy, and endemic poverty. Yet from the roots of a scraggly French outpost built near the mouth the mighty Mississippi has come a remarkable city which has generated America’s first indigenous art form, jazz; cuisine admired the world over; magnificent colonial architecture; brilliant literature; and an inimitable multicultural society.”

That understanding of the complex nature of New Orleans seems to be what guided Tama in creating his project. Some of the photographs of everyday people—like little girls goofing around for the camera in 2007 in the B.W. Cooper housing project—are at once charming and engaging. The girls come across as playful and sassy, which seems unique until you see other New Orleanians that are just as vibrant.

The photographs in the book are not chronological, which forces the reader to look at the people and their home instead of just the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Many of the images have an antique feeling to them, like something familiar from a bygone era. Tama credits an early influence for this.

“My initial inspiration for being a journalist was the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers,” he says, referring to the government-commissioned images that documented Americans in everyday life, especially in rural and small-town areas, and showed the impact of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the advent of farm mechanization. “These are the types of pictures I was inspired by, so I think that type is layered into my perception when I’m shooting.”

Tama, who lives in New York City and has been promoting his book, is donating all of the proceeds to the New School for New Orleans. And his fascination with the place hasn't waned. A few recent book signings in New Orleans have only reaffirmed his feeling that it's a true gem.

“The whole idea of New Orleans is to hold on to your history as much as possible,” Tama says. “They really try to preserve their history. Progress is not a priority in New Orleans.”