After the Flood Photographs by Robert Polidori

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has devastating photo exhibit of the destruction that Hurricane Katarina caused to buildings in New Orleans.

Robert Polidori (Canadian, b. 1951), one of the world's premier architectural photographers, has recorded the disasters of our time as well as the failures of contemporary society. Amid the scenes of destruction and chaos in New Orleans, as in his past projects in Havana, Versailles, and Chernobyl, Polidori finds a formal beauty that radiates stillness and compassion and invites contemplation. The wrecked rooms, collapsed houses, and ravaged neighborhoods on view in "After the Flood" become metaphors for human fragility. Using a large-format camera, natural light, and unusually long exposures, Polidori records the destruction with a mastery of color, light, shadow, and texture that brings to life discarded mementos and mud-caked belongings. In each image, the artist seems to have captured the very air of New Orleans, weighted heavily with mold, humidity, and history.

The photographs are strong, yet with no human element in them, they suffer a huge emptiness. The emptiness of the sorrow of a person’s face and body that have lost everything.