I don't think my senior thesis is working out how I want it to. The content and idea won't change, but instead of making large prints and concentrating mostly on the photogaphy I think I will try and bind a book- and not do what I usually do (taking dollar books from the Strand and photo-mounting my own images on the pages) but instead really binding it well and stronger and with more text. Most of my photos from last week are very overexposed. Below are some paragraphs introducing the House of Studies and Einstein. I'll add more later. The photos are of Nygel, a canal and the Six Flags sign outside of Einstein.
I opened my eyes in the dark, a minute before the alarm clock broke the quiet and rolled off my plastic-coated twin mattress pad. The wasps buzzed around the frayed screen of my open second floor window. A leaking sink stuck out of the wall near the foot of my bed, I turned its steel handle and the faucet blasted hard water against my hands. For the past three years, local newspapers had been telling the public to avoid drinking tap water. I raised my palms to my face and let the cold water drip down my face and neck into my t-shirt. The heat outside would dry my clothes within a half an hour. I changed into my uniform and met the other who were waiting outside on the steps, in a loose half-circle. We sat silently before boarding the vans heading to our separate campsites.
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To the farthest east of the city, outside of the St. Bernard Parish, is The Einstein Charter School. On the outside, the building is layered with grey painted rectangles covering graffiti on the blue brick pillars. The lopsided roof is missing shingles and the school seems to have fallen out of the sky and into an overgrown field. The grass behind the main building is pockmarked with Cisco wine bottles, foil hot fry bags, lost socks, deflated basketballs and moldy wet mattresses. Neighborhood kids and teenagers play games on these abandoned mattresses, jumping from one onto the other until they get bored.
The football goal posts stand at a 50-degree angle from the wind force of the storm three years before. Beyond the field is a labyrinth of small, one-story houses, some trailers are still parked in front, and some houses still have the red or orange crosses and numbers spray painted beside the front door.
This elementary and middle school building was home to an AmeriCorps summer camp during the hot vacation months the kids were supposed to have away from classrooms. The program was free for low-income families with the exception of a $15 fee for three Gulfsouth Youth Action Corps t-shirts that the campers would never wear. Inside, the heat of the school rose, and the humid air was thick with smells of mold, urine, warm pencil shavings and sour milk. The fluorescent lights in the wide main hallway were kept off during May, June, July and August to keep the building cooler. It didn’t seem to be working. At each end of the hallway were thick metal doors, wrapped in unlocked chains; the daylight came inside, highlighting the bottom ½ inch where the door did not reach the floor.
