| |
 |
| ©Robert Polidori |
| Click photo to launch a slideshow with more images from After the Flood. |
After the Flood
By Robert Polidori
Steidl/D.A.P.; 336 pages; 582 color illustrations; $90
The most significant news story of 2005, Hurricane Katrina, brought forth a slew of photo books in 2006. This one is notable for its sheer mass (it measures 12x16 inches and weighs more than ten pounds), as well as its devastating comprehensiveness. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Polidori's tome painstakingly documents the horrors, home by abandoned home, that the storm and the broken levees wreaked on New Orleans. Polidori has described the project as bearing psychological witness to the ruins, reflecting on the lives of the deceased and the displaced through what remains of their homes. Though the book eventually progresses to scenes of repair and relief (as trailer homes and appliances arrive on tattered streets), the bulk of it is a heartbreaking wave of tangled wreckage and surreal mementos. In recent years Polidori has produced a number of remarkable books, featuring subjects as different as the skylines of Shanghai and the devastated city of Chernobyl. This one stands out from the rest.
|
