On August 24, 1992 Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida. The storm had winds over 160 miles per hour and was the most costly disaster in the nation's history. The storm caused between 20 to 30 billion dollars in damge. In a few brief hours, the southern half of Dade County was changed forever. A total of thirty-eight people were killed by the storm, 80,000 homes were destroyed, and 225,000 people were left homeless.   The photographs that follow are by students who witnessed the destruction of Hurricane Andrew firsthand. They include images taken by students in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades. The project grew out of the desire of one of the editors, Colette Stemple, to empower students to create and rebuild after the community had been engulfed by destruction and despair. The photographs were taken using twenty-five K-1000 cameras contributed to Southwood Middle School by the Pentax Corporation. Assistance was also provided by the Agfa Corporation through the Nova Graphics Corporation, the Eastman Kodak Corporation, Kinko’s Copies Incorporated, Pitman Photo Supply, Benson’s Camera, and Art Plastics. The photographs were taken before and after the storm. Most of them were shot in the last two weeks of September 1992, barely a month after the hurricane hit the community. Students chose a variety of photographic techniques to express their feelings about the storm. These included: gelatin silver printing unlatered and handcolored, color prints, collages, and color laser images. Photographs taken by the children were subsequently exhibited at the Pentax Corporate Headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, the Capitol Calleries in Tallahassee, Florida, the DeVargas Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the national convention of the American Institute of Architects at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables Florida, at Pitman Photo Gallery, and the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, Florida                                       Financial and demographic damage caused by Hurricane Andrew was relatively easy to estimate. What was more difficult to determine were the psychological and personal losses caused by the storm. The winds of Andrew tore at the very fabric of people’s identities and lives. Homes were lost, keepsakes and momentos destroyed, family photographs, birth certificates--the records of people’s lives--blown into oblivion. Following the storm, people’s lives were further torn assunder as jobs were lost and friends moved out of the storm-ravaged areas. We believe that the Hurricane Andrew photographs taken by the students at Southwood Middle School represent the first large-scale documentation by child victims of a major natural disaster. As such, these photographs are noteworthy historical documents. However, they represent much more. They are powerful personal testaments and artistic creations--in many cases, of the highest order. Many of these photographs will stand as the main visual and historical record of Hurricane Andrew and its impact on the South Florida community. In the hands of the students who took these pictures, the alchemy of art transformed personal tragedy into an inspiring creative experience. Included here is a representative selection of photographs taken by the students at Southwood. It should be noted that in the Fall of 1993, negatives and prints of the children’s photographs were collected by the editors and, with the help of William Brown, (Director of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Miami’s Otto G. Richter Library), an archive of the children’s materials was establsihed. In addition, with the help of Alison Nordstron (Director of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Florida), the children’s collages were accessioned into the museum’s permanent collection.