Hurricane Season marks the third time that the multiple-award winning Swedish photographer, Hannah Modigh has made middle America the focus of her lens. Her previous works, Hillbilly Heroin, Honey and Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down were their own unique commentaries on modern Americana, while Hurricane Season takes a far more desolate look at the American Dream. Set in Southern Louisiana, her moody images create a stunningly bleak series that captures the uncertainty, vulnerability and tedium of living in wait for the next natural disaster.
With the near year-round threat of hurricanes and the enduring remnants of historical racism and prejudice, Modigh felt in Louisiana a constant sense of anticipation and a near omnipresence of death. Working with a small point-and-shoot-camera, she sought to communicate this sensation as best she could, creating a sense of emotional patterns in each frame.
Hurricane Season is an interpretation of ordinary moments in the lives of some of the state's poorer residents; ordinary moments that feel as though they are always on the verge of morphing into something more devastating.
“In Louisiana, the threat of hurricanes arrives annually, but the storm around the poorest people is felt daily,” Modigh told Dazed Digital. “I think of permanent vigilance, or recovery, and the constant need to start over. Memories that never have the luxury of time to heal. Anger springs from fear, a dam against chaos. In the storm with all the destructive power, the people I met were like pillars in the water, holding up the houses. Hurricane Season, deals with the transient nature of life and how people deal with impermanence – this theme is common to all of my work.”
