Chris Rose
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For the past year Rose has issued regular dispatches from New Orleans’s pain centers, describing up close the wonders and horrors of post-Katrina life. “I started covering the story the way it unfolded to me,” Rose says. “I’m not Mike Royko; I’m not pretending to be everyman here. I’m just wandering through neighborhoods on foot and bike, trying to get flat tires fixed, dealing with the suicides of my friends.” In February he collected and published the first four months of those dispatches as 1 Dead in Attic, a fund-raiser of sorts (proceeds are being shared with Tipitina’s Foundation and ARTDOCS, two charities that help New Orleans artists and musicians) that also features the work of British photojournalist Charlie Varley.
In those early days after the hurricane the Times-Picayune Web site became a national source for Katrina news, and the response to Rose’s column was immediate and enormous. He says the first onslaught of e-mails–maybe a thousand or two–crashed his laptop. Some came from evacuees compelled to share their own stories. “I’m sure I have the largest archive of personal Katrina stories that anybody has made,” Rose says. “They’re far more devastating than anything I’ve gone through. I’ve been through some emotional hardship, but these stories are of death and destruction, sorrow and displacement.”
The city has slowly started to recover, but Rose doesn’t see himself returning to celebrity gossip. He says one of the biggest battles New Orleans has to face now is restoring and defending its image. “I think there’s a great cross section of America that thinks we deserved it because we don’t castigate our gay citizens and because we embrace music and eccentricity and beer. We’ll always have that to deal with. It’s ludicrous to suggest that having Mardi Gras or going to a football game constitutes a moral affront. Survivor’s guilt gets you nowhere.”
