After Hurricane Katrina, in September, 2005 Robert Polidori came to New Orleans where as an adolescent he had lived for a few years in a Gentilly neighborhood. The artist shot photographs of the devastation for the New Yorker magazine where he was then staff photographer. Polidori stayed longer in New Orleans than he originally planned. He would make four extended visits to the city through April, 2006. Polidori took hundreds of pictures with a large format camera that produced wide, superbly detailed color photographs filled with pathos.

Polidori’s quietly expressive photographs present a candid and intimate look at widespread destruction in New Orleans—an incomprehensible landscape of felled trees, rooms caked with mud, cruelly tumbled furniture and houses washed off foundations. The color photographs were made by the artist to validate and honor the lives of the families who lost their homes.