The Sound of Our Resurrection Is Stronger Than the Silence of Death, 2017
Chandra McCormick (b. 1957) and Keith Calhoun (b. 1955)
Kodachrome film
Courtesy the artists

Photographs that Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick had taken over a period of almost thirty years were waterlogged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In a moment of brilliance, the couple placed the negatives in a freezer, hoping to halt the effects of the water. Five years later, they began printing them, revealing beautifully distorted images of aesthetic ruin. The Sound of Our Resurrection Is Stronger Than the Silence of Death is an image of daily life in the 1980s in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Calhoun and McCormick consider the physical survival of the image in its altered form as a means of preserving communal memory and, metaphorically, a symbol of the community’s resilience. Through their work, one is confronted with the aesthetic and memorial value of damage instead of its conventional negative associations. Might their actions be considered a form of conservation?