
A group of Tallahassee artists, a drone pilot and Nashville photographer Jeremy Cowart have a new online art project that highlights the devastation caused by Hurricane Michael in Florida’s panhandle.
The project, Neverforgottencoast.com, shows arresting aerial photographs of storm victims lying on large red hearts placed where their homes and businesses used to be. The hearts are also part a themed logo for T-shirts which are being sold as a fundraiser for local nonprofits working to help impacted communities, including Panama City and Mexico Beach.
Alex Workman, 32, of Tallahassee, was part of a creative project called Voices of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a project where artists and volunteers used drones to photograph victims and their devastated surroundings after a 2016 fire that destroyed half of Gatlinburg, claiming 14 lives and destroying 2,000 homes and businesses.
For the neverforgottencoast project, Workman, his wife, Chelsea, designer Jesse Taylor, and Tallahassee drone pilot Jonathan Smith combined forces. For the website, storm victims tell their harrowing stories and articulate their hopes for the future.
“We thought maybe a window would break because we couldn’t board our house, but we were not thinking we could come home to nothing,” say the owners of KCSportfishing in Mexico Beach.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.