Robert Polidori
Artist statement
The idea for my book After the Flood came to
me a few days after I arrived in New Orleans,
two weeks after the onslaught of Hurricane
Katrina. I was sent there by The New Yorker
magazine to cover the devastation that this
storm had unleashed on the fragile city.
I immediately realized that the scope of this
catastrophe was much greater than that
I had imagined, and so I took it upon myself to
return and follow the evolution of the recovery.
I envisioned making a book on the immediate
aftermath of the flooding, the demolition of the
houses, and what I expected to be their eventual
reconstruction. After four visits to the city
(September 2005; January, March and May
2006), I realized that there would not be any
substantial reconstruction. The primary reason
is that the city’s economy vanished with the
residents’ collective evacuation. Because of
this, my book covers only 180º of the recovery
cycle that I initially imagined.
It has long been my conviction that rooms
are both metaphors and catalysts for states of
being, and are thus an insight into the soul of
their occupants. We may take a portrait of an
individual, and indeed feel many emotions and
imagine their personalities or histories in detail,
but I believe that by photographing the interior
of an abode we know much more about one’s
actual personality and personal values. The
interior spaces that I photographed in New
Orleans were still moist from the receding
flood – and indeed the stench of organic rot,
the sagging carpets, and waterlogged
floorboards made photographing difficult –
but it was nevertheless important to me to
record for posterity a panorama of mementos
of interrupted lives. It is also important to note
that the overwhelming majority of these
interiors’ occupants are still alive today, living
a different life somewhere else. Together with
the exteriors, in which I attempted to make
visual sense of the forces of chaos that threw
houses about as if they were made of
cardboard, these photographic records are
offered as a kind of visual last rites for life
trajectories that are no more.