As a participant in New Orleans’s “Look and Leave” program, Jane Fulton Alt accompanied Lower Ninth Ward residents back to their homes for the first time since fleeing Hurricane Katrina. Alt’s photographs and stories reflect the intense drama of the epic loss this community endured while highlighting lasting hope and inspiration. It is through Alt’s social worker’s compassion and keen photographer’s eye that we are given a better understanding of what it meant to be a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina.

Jane Fulton Alt shows the diverse elements of the burn—the mysterious luminosity, the smoke that both obscures and reveals. She says, "I was immediately struck by the burn's visual and expressive potential, as well as the way it evoked themes that are at the core of my photographic work—the moment when life and death are not contradictory but are perceived as as a single process."