Photographer Ted Jackson stood on an elevated bridge, looked down into the Lower Ninth Ward, and saw four women and their three young children clinging for their lives atop their front porch railing. They were surrounded by water that nearly reached their chests. Jackson had no rope, no boat, nothing to help.
He snapped a photo with his camera, discreetly. But the eyes of one of the women caught the camera, haunting him, begging him to do something.
Jackson left, returned to The Times-Picayune newspaper where he worked, borrowed an inflatable boat and rope and made his way back to help them. By then, the women and children were gone.
This was the first moral challenge Jackson faced while working in the hours after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans early Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, broke levees and caused floodwaters to swallow most of the city. The line between documenting one of America’s deadliest natural disasters and exploiting personal tragedies sat at the forefront of every decision he made. So, after snapping that first image of those people on their porch, he made a decision.
“If I couldn’t help them, I didn’t take their picture,” Jackson recalled.
The next day, Tuesday, he made another decision that would change his life. He had spent the previous two nights in the newsroom with colleagues covering the storm and their family members, but now they had to evacuate in the newspaper’s trucks. With flood waters rising, the paper’s leaders decided that staying was no longer safe.
“I couldn’t make myself get in the back of those trucks,” Jackson said. “I told my editor, ‘I’m not going.’”
His editor asked what he was going to do.
“I have no idea,” Jackson responded. He wasn’t trying to be heroic, he said, he just didn’t want to lose the ability to make his own choices amid the chaos.
A small, green, flat-bottomed boat had been left on the back steps of the newspaper. Jackson saw an opportunity.
“If there’s a motor on that boat, I’m taking it,” he thought.
He found only a broken broom in the boat. Good enough. “God has sent me a boat,” he thought.
As Jackson watched the trucks pull away with his coworkers, he felt alone and briefly rethought his “scary situation.” But he began paddling with that broken broomstick and snapping a few photos. He didn’t stop for five hours, all the while working out in his mind other complex situations he might face.
“If someone was begging for help, but they were safe where they were, I’d leave them because I knew help was coming,” he recalled thinking. “But if they were in the water desperate, then I would go and get them.”
He went back to that moment, looking at the women and children on the porch. He hadn’t realized that they were balancing on the railing until he noticed their heads near the top of the front door frame. An elderly man approached to figure out how to help, but neither of them had the right tools. When Jackson stepped back and raised his camera, the stranger, disgusted, turned to face him.
“How could you take a photo of them in a time like this?” he asked sharply.
Jackson replied, “One day I’d like to take you out for a cup of coffee to really explain why I did.”
“I will never get a cup of coffee with the likes of you,” the man said to him. The memory stung.
Finally, after paddling about five miles from where he began, Jackson’s boat ran onto dry land at Causeway Boulevard in suburban Metairie. He walked a few feet and collapsed. As a news photographer at The Times-Picayune since 1984, he was used to long days, but nothing had felt like this. He carried two cameras and a backpack loaded with his laptop, water, food and a cell phone that wasn’t connecting. A short while later, he woke up to helicopters overhead. They landed in a nearby staging area, and Jackson was able to board one and get aerial shots of a city under water.
“The city drowned just like that,” Jackson recalled. “You didn’t know what was coming next, if there was a city left.”
From there, Jackson hitched rides on a military dump truck and a rescue boat back to the city. He kept his promise, helping where he could. He ran into a fellow photographer, who gave him a place to sleep.
Two days later, Jackson joined a group of photographers headed to the convention center. They had heard a riot was breaking out. Instead, they found 30,000 desperate people, begging for help. In that moment Angela Perkins caught Jackson’s eyes and camera lens. His ethical dilemma came full circle when she dropped to her knees, crying, praying, screaming: “Help us, please, please!”
Jackson said he knew then he wasn’t exploiting her. He was helping her, helping them all.
“She was praying to the world to help through the lens of the camera,” he said. “She wasn’t praying for me to help her … She was screaming to the world for help.”
The pictures alerted the world to the dire state of New Orleans. “The world was shocked because this isn’t supposed to happen in America, this level of utter chaos,” Jackson said.
After many days of work, Jackson felt depleted, like he could not continue. Then, his phone rang. It was a San Francisco number. His friend, Gary Fong, whom he’d met months earlier at a “Christians in Photojournalism” seminar, was checking on him.
“And I said, ‘Gary, I am not OK. We are so messed up down here. I don’t know what’s going to happen to all of us,’” Jackson recalled.
Fong had called to pray over him — the first time in Jackson’s life someone had done that. The prayer flipped a switch, Jackson said, giving him the strength to carry on.
These days, when Jackson and his wife, Nancy, think back to that harrowing time, they see God.
“God was all around us,” Nancy Jackson said.
Their suburban home about 45 minutes from the city was spared, despite trees falling all around it.
She also believes God protected her husband and oldest son, Chris, who lived in Mobile, Alabama, but flew into New Orleans with a helicopter search and rescue team and was pulling people from rooftops and trees, as his dad documented the disaster with a camera.
Nancy Jackson said it was her husband’s faith that led him to ask the moral questions.
“He has a very close relationship with God,” she said. “And so, I know one of the things that he’s always struggled with is ‘when do I help and when do I shoot?’”
Ted Jackson wondered endlessly what happened to the family on the porch — then, months later, a colleague tracked them down as part of a special project. Jackson talked to them and learned they had been rescued by teenage boys in a fishing boat. They were safe in Houston’s Astrodome. Jackson got to tell them he’d left because he thought they would try to push the littlest one to him on a floating log, and he feared she wouldn’t make it. He told them he had returned for them in a boat.
They had just one request: that photo. They wanted a tangible reminder of their strength and perseverance.
