A third Canadian makes a rather indirect appearance in the Met's "New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori": Neil Young. Interior views of ravished rooms illuminate much of the Met show, which is the nucleus of a larger collection found in the large-format photography book, "Robert Polidori: After the Flood". One image in particular, "1923 Lamanche Street New Orleans, Louisiana, March 2006," shows a tattered American flag propped up against a great pile of debris in a mound in a wrecked living room. Polidori calls the image his "Neil Young cover."

Polidori doesn't do album cover work, although a Berlin band — he can't remember its name — plans to use one of his images. So it's extremely unlikely that this meticulously photographed melee on Lamanche Street, with its hint of stars-and-stripes Yankee pride, will end up wrapped around a collection of Young tunes. Yet Polidori is right about this stagy image. It is Neil Young-like, gloriously pumped up, cranky and jaggedly engaging with just enough Surrealism in the mix — the rifle just laying there, the hanging lights — to pump up the volume.

"What we're dealing with here," says Polidori who sounds like an old-time baseball manager when he speaks, "is the image of extreme unction or last rights for the stuff itself, for the emblems of things, for mementos left by people, for the chosen moments of individual lives. It's about the people who say, `I lost all my stuff. And I ain't buyin' new stuff.'"

"New Orleans after the Flood" is emotional, not analytical, proactive, not reflective. Responding to New Orleans' show-business sensibility, Polidori frames each chosen image of the Katrina disaster as if all the wrecked stuff is having one last turn in the spotlight.