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Loading... Robert Polidori: After the Floodby Robert Polidori
Disaster Books (51) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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. ( ) no reviews | add a review
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A record of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Photographer Robert Polidori, entered and photgraphed the abandoned houses, many of which were still water-logged or carried the 8 ft tide-mark of the floods. He thought of his photographs as the work of a psychological voyeur, mapping the lives of the absent people through their abandoned belongings, but struggled with the problem of making beautiful images from human disaster. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)976.3350640222History and Geography North America South Central U.S. Louisiana Southeast Louisiana Orleans ParishLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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