As it gets closer to the year anniversary of Hurricane Helene hitting the CSRA, Jessye Norman School of the Arts is accepting submissions for the “One Year Later – Scenes from the Hurricane” photo exhibit.
The exhibit is the brainchild of Carmen Moses, the JNSA afterschool site director. During the hurricane, she said a tree fell into her house and on the bed where her and her husband were sleeping.
“Just that whole experience was really humbling and really scary, but it was also weirdly enough one of the best things that has ever happened,” Moses said. “It was just one of those things that just completely transforms life.”
Moses, who has a degree in photography and printmaking, took a lot of photos in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene for logistical reasons. But her photography brain has her framing the photos in different ways.
“Then they became art pieces to me, not just documentation,” she said. “I was thinking about other people, you know there’s really, you can make a painting about this experience, but it’s never going to say as much as a photograph… I started seeing other people’s photographs and started seeing other people’s experiences with the hurricane and it wasn’t just traumatic. It was a collective trauma, but I’ve also seen and felt hope and kindness in ways I had never felt in my life before. So, it’s like, ok I lost my house, but I just gained this amazing experience and seeing the way that community members helped, seeing the way people were just offering whatever they could to each other. It was such a deep and enriching experience. I was like, I know I’m not experiencing this alone, so I want to see how other people are viewing this through that photographic lens.”
With the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helen approaching, Moses asked JNSA if they could hold an exhibit to mark the occasion.
“(Carmen) came to me and said ‘hey, what do you think about doing a one-year retrospective on the hurricane,’” said Gary Dennis, executive director of the JNSA. “And I said ‘yeah, I think that would be great,’ especially if we could include the upside, the hope and the resilience and the fact that it was a tremendous loss for a lot of people. But our community is strong and everybody really pulled together. There were a lot of positive stories to share that came out of it as well. I hope that’s represented in the photography.”
Moses added that she believes there are some good stories out there following the hurricane that need to be told. One of the submissions, which she described as “incredibly poignant,” is of a little boy brushing his teeth by flashlight.
“That was kind of everyone’s experience you just had to adapt. You couldn’t quit brushing your teeth, you couldn’t quit doing what you needed to do. So just finding the creative ways to handle that. the lady that submitted that photo also submitted part of a children’s book she was writing about this hurricane experience…it was just about people coming together and putting what little they had together to make sure the whole community was taken care of.”
Those interested in participating can submit photos and videos. For photos they must be gallery ready, which means printed and ready to hang. For video, those submitting entries needs to have a plan for the display. Moses did say there will be a TV and some projection screens.
There is no limit on how many entries a person can submit. The submissions will be juried and after the deadline, all artists picked will be notified.
The deadline to turn in submit entries into the exhibit is July 15. For more information on the exhibit, including how to submit entries, visit https://thejnsa.org/upcoming-events/2025/1/3/one-year-later-scenes-from-the-hurricane
The exhibit will run from Aug. 15 – Oct. 3. There will be a show opening reception on Sept. 5.
