Stringing for the Wall Street Journal, freelance photographer Veasey Conway ’12 spent seven days in September navigating Hurricane Florence, which ended up being the wettest tropical cyclone to visit the Carolinas in recorded history. And while it was his first disaster-oriented assignment, Conway asked his editor to let him eschew customary day-of and day-after footage to focus on the event’s human toll, in both the short and long term.
“I wanted to capture the scale of the storm and the nature of the landscape,” Conway says. “And then I endeavored to put people in the scene. That meant spending concentrated periods of time with those who were affected. So, if they were going in and out of a flooded home carrying their stuff, I spent 20 or 30 minutes walking with them. My goal was to get as close as I could without invading their space. That, to me, was the best way to get viewers to empathize.”
Functioning as a “self-contained mobile unit,” Conway initially left his home in Durham—Toyota Prius packed with extra batteries, food, and water—for Jacksonville, in eastern North Carolina, where Florence was due to make landfall. After chronicling last-minute preparations there, he rode out the worst of the winds holed up in a local motel before traveling some 40 miles northeast to New Bern, where a Journal reporter was interviewing residents about the damage done to their homes and businesses, which would ultimately exceed $100 million.
“What really stuck with me is that the vast majority of people I met were very positive,” says Conway. “There they were, staring at all this devastation, and they were saying, ‘We’re still here. We still have our family. We will find a way to continue.’ ”
Having recently finished a graduate degree in visual communication at the University of North Carolina, Conway hopes that one of the various local or national publications he works for will send him back to the scene of the storm for a follow-up piece. “The hurricane itself is just the beginning of a long story,” he says. “Some people are still in transitional housing. Some are still recovering from previous floods. And with so many natural disasters in the news, it’s easy for us to forget about them.”
