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Steidl Publishing
November 2006
On Sale: November 15, 2006
333 pages
ISBN: 3865212778
EAN: 9783865212771
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
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 waterlogged as he
entered and as he learned (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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