When Tropical Storm Helene ripped through Western North Carolina on Sept. 27, seemingly everyone took out their phones to document the colossal destruction around them.
Local professional photographers and videographers did the same, strapping on their equipment as soon as they could to venture into the flooded landscapes. For some, their journey was self-guided, snapping film to immortalize places personal to them. Others landed temporary gigs with national news teams.
The following stories highlight some of the individuals who used their own unique lens to capture the storm and its aftermath.
Daily sirens
In the weeks immediately following Helene, filmmaker Rod Murphy would leave his home in Black Mountain, camera in hand, with no destination in mind. In pursuit of documenting his community’s resilience and trauma, he let the day’s events determine his route.
A filmmaker by trade, Murphy has produced documentaries as well as corporate and nonprofit videos.
In the early days of recovery, the United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County reached out to Murphy. The collaboration resulted in the videographer nestled with troops on the back of a military vehicle and in a helicopter filming aerial footage.
Later on, Murphy connected with both local and national news stations. Meanwhile, throughout his daily outings, residents pointed him to various recovery efforts in nearby neighborhoods and hollers.
“It happened day after day after day, just being in weird situations that I’d never thought of,” Murphy says. These unique experiences, he continues, are what fuels him as an artist. “You get into people’s lives that you would never know anything about otherwise.”
The footage he captured in Helene’s wake was different from anything Murphy previously shot. Typically, Murphy says, there’s a lot of nuance with how things are filmed, and the process can sometimes feel overly curated. Even with documentary films, he’s found himself jaded because “people just present themselves the way they want to be seen.” But in the case of Helene, “everyone was so raw, so absolutely their true selves,” he says.
Contrary to a polished documentary, Murphy says he intentionally kept in the loud daily sirens and muffled helicopters that marked the initial weeks of recovery. These sounds, he says, are the score to his series.
So far, Murphy has amassed 20 hours of footage through his independent and organizational projects. Six of his personal video projects are published on his YouTube channel @rodmurphy011.
“You can feel the mood when you look at these things. There’s desperation, but also, everybody’s so grateful to be there, and they’re trying to help,” Murphy says. “As much as it’s nice to not be in that moment, it’s good to remember those moments.”
Windows to the soul
In downtown Marshall, an area hit hard by Helene, Sarah Jones Decker has spent the past several months capturing her fellow community members in black-and-white stills.
A resident for over 20 years, Decker wears several hats around town — a professional photographer, a local author, co-owner of Root Bottom Farm and a former professor of art and photography at Mars Hill University.
Decker says she used to prompt her students with the philosophical question “Are you a maker or a finder?” In the aftermath of Helene, she’s found that her answer is a fusion of the two.
“I’ve always been a finder,” Decker says. “But in this project, it’s challenged me because not only am I a finder, I’ve also found my voice as a maker.”
Once a person or location catches her eye, Decker captures them on tintypes — a process popularized during the Civil War. Tintypes are produced by pouring collodion directly on a thin sheet of blackened metal instead of glass, which is then immersed in silver nitrate to make it light sensitive and able to produce an image. The entire process needs to be completed before the plate dries out.
“There’s nothing fast about wet plate collodion,” Decker says.
Because the process involves light-sensitive chemicals, a darkroom is needed. To make the process work on the road, Decker says she put on her “maker” hat and built her own mobile darkroom in the back of her Subaru.
The first image she took post-Helene was of Joel Friedman, owner of Zuma Coffee & Provisions, a staple in downtown Marshall for 22 years. (Despite extensive damage, Friedman is working to reopen the business later this year.) When Decker approached him, she says Friedman knew immediately where he wanted to be photographed — in the barren space that once held his shop’s kitchen and office.
“And he went and sat in the rubble,” Decker says. “The picture showed up in the fixer, and I started crying, I was so emotional.”
When Decker posted a digital scan of the tintype on Facebook, the community’s response was immediate and heartfelt. Since that time, Decker has taken 85 additional portraits with plans to keep going.
The process has been therapeutic, Decker says, and allows both her and her subjects to slow down during the whirlwind of recovery tasks.
Decker recalls more than one instance where she and her subject have stood on the street crying together as the photos develop.
“There’s something just so raw and truthful about black-and-white photography,” Decker says, describing the tintypes as windows to the soul.
She hopes sharing these photos will help outsiders see how special Marshall and its community members are.
“I hope that they see the beauty, strength and resilience of a really special place and the people that make it special,” Decker says. “Marshall is often referred to as ‘Magic Town,’ and making these tintypes in the street really feels like the magic that I can share to the greater magic that we’re creating as a community together during this difficult time.”
To learn more about her work, visit avl.mx/ejd.
Symbolic shoots
Xpress recently joined cinematographer Rebecca MacNeice for her daily drive, where she captures a raw image at a location impacted by Helene. In some instances, such as this day’s journey, she’s circling back to sites to see how time has altered the landscape. MacNeice posts these photos, unedited, with a date, time and location on her Instagram page @rebeccamacneice.
Traveling down a road in Barnardsville, it’s clear the storm’s impact is far from being in the community’s rearview.
The day’s location is what remains of the home owned by MacNeice’s close friends Christi and Simon Whiteley. The couple, who operate Fleetwood’s in West Asheville, were renting out the property at the time of the storm. No stranger to the site, MacNeice has photographed the property before.
The air is still and heavy that day. The majority of the household goods remain buried beneath mud. We make our way inside. Colorful cabinets hang from hinges — the only indication that we are in the home’s former kitchen. It’s as if no time has passed since Sept. 27.
In addition to Barnardsville, MacNeice frequently visits Swannanoa River Road, Bat Cave and downtown Marshall.
“In the early days, I would drive around, and then I started realizing I was coming back to the same places over and over again,” MacNeice says.
“These places were part of my emotional landscape over a few decades,” she continues. “Some of these roads and places I go to — my connection to it is as thin as that, but also it’s forever changed. So in a few instances, yes, I’m going to places I liked a lot. But in other places, I’m returning to the scene of the crime and the connection to it at this moment.”
Across from the Whiteley property is another site that MacNeice has previously photographed: a school bus that had been cast in the river during the storm.
The original post on Nov. 6 captured the bus completely overturned. Now, the Barnardsville bus is upright on the river’s bank.
Preparing for the new shoot, MacNeice pulls water-resistant pants over her leggings and tucks them into a pair of rain boots to trudge across the cold waters of the Swannanoa River. Although her trunk is loaded with different video cameras, she chooses to use her phone.
“The most emotionally evocative things come from the smaller cameras,” MacNeice says.
Through June’s eyes
A little boy in colorful pajamas complete with a neon helmet and ski goggles stands in front of the ruin that once was the playground in Carrier Park. This is just one of many photos filmmaker Patrick Bresnan has captured of his 4-year-old son, June, post-Helene.
A lot of Bresnan’s photos aim to document Helene through June’s eyes, chronicling his son’s costumed journey, standing as a bright contrast to the debris-torn world around him. In some photographs June is waiting in line for bottled water; in others, he paints fallen tree limbs. And, of course, there are plenty of his pictures of him at parks.
“Many of the places that we used to go to were along the river,” Bresnan says. “It’s hard to just let go of it, you want to go back and just imagine that it will be there. So, we’ve been going to these places, maybe just as a kind of therapy. And coming to terms with the fact that it’s not going to be the same.”
Bresnan is a full-time videographer whose short films have premiered at film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes. But in the wake of Helene, he’s focused much of his efforts on still shots.
He says there’s incentive to capture places as they are — before they’re bulldozed or hauled away.
“We want to remember the level of destruction and we want to remember what we’ve lost before it’s rebuilt,” Bresnan says. “You create an image so that we can remember what happened. Because in three years, these landscapes along the Swannanoa and in the River Arts District, they’ll be completely different, and tourists will come, and it will be as if that part of Asheville … never was there.”
In addition to his still shots, Bresnan also filmed clips for the federally funded broadcasting network Voice of America to document FEMA’s response.
Bresnan is no stranger to documenting disasters. In 2005, he worked with the Mennonites who volunteered to rebuild homes in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“I spent a lot of time on the Gulf Coast post-Katrina, then we had Ike, Hurricane Harvey. Then when I lived in Austin, we had something called the Bastrop fires, which were these massive forest fires,” Bresnan says.
Bresnan and MacNeice have a future project planned, wherein they will float down the Swannanoa River to document the destruction.
“There’s very long-term consequences of this for people and for the region, and those are the stories that are harder to tell because people fall further and further to the margins,” Bresnan says. “Through these photos and keeping people here and within these stories, we can keep the awareness on the region.”
Taking the photos for Bresnan has helped him come to terms with the new world around him.
“I’m photographing it as a way to process it, as a way to really understand what people have lost and to really process how much work we have to do to restore the rivers and to restore people’s homes and people’s lives,” he says.
