AFTER THE FLOOD

Robert In late September 2005, photographer Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to document the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. Arriving at night he found few inhabitants left among the devastated ruins of the city. The next day he began photographing and entering the abandoned homes, many of which were still flooded or bore the 8-foot tide mark of the floods. Slowly he began to learn the system of graffiti signs and codes applied to the outside of buildings by relief forces. Each room he entered felt to Polidori like a mother's womb, and he thought of his photographs as the work of a psychological voyeur, mapping the lives of absent people through their abandoned possessions. The discovery of an abandoned body in a house reinforced his struggle with the problem of making beautiful pictures out of human disaster. As with all his work, Polidori has managed to produce much more than a series of documentary images.