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After the Flood.
Photographs by Robert Polidori.
Steidl,
Gottingen,
2006.
336 pp., 582 color illustrations, 15¼x11¾".
Publisher's Description
Second printing available in August 2007.
In late September 2005, Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to record
the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and by the city’s broken levees.
He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark.
The next day he began to photograph, house by house: “All the places
I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I
collectively call ‘the army,’ of maybe 20 National Guards from New
Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New
York . . . On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think
that the occupants had been there prior. And some of them did leave certain
funeral-like mementos before they left. Maybe right after the waters
receded they had the chance to just—to go back to their place and just
see, and realize there’s nothing worth saving.” Amidst all this, Polidori has
found something worth saving, has created mementos for those who
could not return, documenting the paradoxically beautiful wreckage. In
classical terms, he has found ruins. The abandoned houses he recorded
were still water-logged when he entered them, learning as he went (by
trial-and-error, a process that including finding a dead body) the language
of signs and codes in which rescue workers had spray-painted
each house’s siding. He sees the resulting photographs as the work of a
psychological witness, mapping the lives of the absent and deceased
through what remains of their belongings and their homes.
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