Jason Andrew

(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


(from "Jazzland") © Jason Andrew


Jason Andrew Graduated from International Center of Photography in 2007 in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program

“Jazzland”

“On August 29th of 2005, the world watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, causing the levee system in New Orleans to fail and flooding over 80% of the city. I was one of the millions of people sat glued to the television as the citizens of New Orleans waited on the roofs of their flooded homes, abandoned and trapped, victims of America’s largest natural disaster.

Two years later, I found myself sliding under a rusted steel gate, about to take a journey into a park few people knew existed. Recently used as a parking lot for FEMA trailers, Jazzland, New Orleans’ Six Flags amusement park, now sat deserted. Only the sound of my footsteps and heartbeat could be heard as I walked through the open front entrance of the park, weary of rabid dogs and my own imagination, which would play tricks on me all day.

While I went to New Orleans intending to photograph people, the loneliness and solitude of the apocalyptic scenes I found at Jazzland drove me to document the once thriving amusement park situated in this beleaguered region of New Orleans. Jazzland is unique, completely different from the rest of the destruction around New Orleans. The park causes chills to rise up your spine as you walk into stores still stocked with souvenirs and stuffed animals, their eyes following you around the room like ghosts from the past. Covered in dirt and mold, the stuffed animals look like abandoned souls left to rot, forgotten memories of someone’s childhood.

The fact that these relics were left behind lent a feeling of preservation to the park which, contrasted by the pervasive decay, created an ominous vision of a nuclear holocaust; whole rides and stores were intact and infested with the pungent smell of rotting clothes festering around every corner. Wondering through Jazzland felt like living an eerie dream, a visual nightmare, one that I continued to relive every time I ventured back into the park.

The decaying skeleton is a physical manifestation to the pain and misery suffered by the people of New Orleans. The park remains untouched; ready to open it’s arms to swarms of children on a sweet summer day that never came. The swamp begins to pierce the grounds of the park, slowly reclaiming the land it was built on. Only the lonely sounds of crickets and the wind can now be heard inside a park that was once filled with the screams of laughter and joy; a relic of Hurricane Katrina and a symbol of our inability to recover from this unnatural disaster.”

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