Mathieu Asselin: Portrait of a Tornado’s Path

It also compelled the New York-based portrait photographer Mathieu Asselin to travel to Joplin to make photographs of the people who had lived through this disaster, amid the detritus left behind. “The level of destruction was such that during my five days there, every morning seemed like the first day again,” he told me. “What I saw was that within minutes the familiarity of the people of Joplin with their landscape had turned into complete unfamiliarity. I wanted to show that shift in my subjects.”