Photographing New Orleans, A Decade After Katrina – The New Yorker

Alec Soth, a photographer who lives in Minneapolis and travels the Midwest and the South with the energy of a latter-day Walker Evans, did not join the artists who came to New Orleans a decade ago to capture what he calls the “eye candy of decay and ruin.” Instead, he waited, preferring to capture the city of water ten years later, a city in a state of both persistent suffering and persistent renewal. Soth shows us the unnerving image of a freestanding column—all that is left of a house in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward—but he moves toward a vision of promise, a lonely figure at his leisure, staring into the waters of today’s New Orleans. ♦