Looks at Robert Polidori's photos of New Orleans
Mills, Nicolaus
TODAY, WHEN we think of the hundreds of thousands of families who between 1935 and 1938 migrated to California after Dust Bowl conditions forced them off their farms in the Great Plains, we...
...In contrast to the familiar World War II photos of bombed-out Hiroshima and Dresden, where everything but the walls of a few buildings lies flattened on the ground, Polidori's post-flood New Orleans is a collage of random disorder...
...In "6328 North Miro Street," a four-poster bed filled with mud looks as if it had been covered in fudge...
...I have done nothing to deserve the situation I am in," she all but says...
...In "North Robertson Street," the steel blades of a ceiling fan droop like the withered petals of a flower...
...The mother is shabbily dressed...
...The artistic differences between Lange and Polidori could not be greater...
...No suffering children beg for our attention...
...He opts instead to put us inside the homes that the victims of Hurricane Katrina no longer occupy, leaving what should be done next to our imaginations...
...No heroic rescue workers search for the missing...
...This coerced anonymity has not prevented Polidori from emphasizing how hard Katrina was on the poor...
...The wrinkles on her sunburned face make her look older than she is...
...It's easy to imagine historians poring over this kind of documentation years from now, as they have with Jacob Riis's photographs of New York City's turn-of-the-century slums...
...For photos by Robert Polidori, visit vvww.dissentmagazine.org . 94 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...She challenges it...
...No corpses lie in the street...
...In removing people from his photographs, in labeling houses by their street number rather than by their owners' names, Polidori has made it clear that in his judgment Hurricane Katrina was all-powerful once it struck land...
...Instead, at the center of Polidori's New Orleans is an after-theflood disaster of biblical proportions that continually challenges our sense of how the world is supposed to look...
...Most revealing are the domestic interiors Polidori has so carefully photographed...
...Polidori never resorts to easy one-upmanship...
...The litter that Polidori's camera has captured is dominated by close-ups of old television sets, mismatched couches, beaten-up tables and chairs—furniture that was disposable long before it was ruined...
...She does not avoid the camera...
...In "1401 Pressberg Street," living room furniture appears as if it had been rearranged by an angry giant, while on an undamaged coffee table, a new telephone sits pristinely in its box...
...Lange's photographs quietly celebrated the Dust Bowl families who through no fault of their own found themselves without homes or work...
...Seventy years later, the men and women displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina have their own photographer of record—Robert Polidori, best known up to now for his photographs of Chernobyl after the Soviet nuclear power plant disaster of 1986...
...Polidori's Katrina photographs have been collected in a massive 333-page book, After the Flood, and this fall twenty-four of them were featured in an exhibition that took up two separate galleries at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art...
...NICOLAUS MILLS teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial (Basic Books...
...Polidori eschews black and white for bright chromogenic prints, and in the photographs at his Metropolitan Museum of Art show, people are missing...
...His bet is that we will see, as he has, that no family subjected to such trauma can be expected to restart its life without first getting the kind of help that government alone can provide for coping with disaster on this scale...
...Nothing is where it should be...
...In "Tupelo Street," a rack of clothes hangs neatly in a closet despite the fact that the room the clothes are in is missing its exterior wall...
...In Lange's most famous photograph, her 1936 "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California," a young mother stares straight into the viewer's eyes, while her two young children, resting on her shoulder, look away as if shy or ashamed to be seen by strangers...
...Primarily a portrait photographer until 1932, Lange found the skills that she had developed for the studio allowed her to capture the worn and tired faces of the "Okie" families trying to begin their lives again in the midst of the Great Depression...
...In the interiors that he photographed, Polidori is not embarrassed to point out that so many New Orleans residents caught in the flood never owned very much in the first place...
...The result is that in Polidori's "New Orleans After the Flood," we cannot make sense of anyDISSENT / Spring 2007 93 thing that happened...
...Cars stand upside down, their rear bumpers leaning against the gutter of a roof...
...There is also a politics of empathy that makes Polidori, for all his modernism, a worthy successor to Dorothea Lange...
...Everyone in its path was temporarily rendered anonymous...
...But at the core of Polidori's insistence on the biblical nature of the disaster that he recorded during 2005 and 2006, there is finally more than record keeping...
...Her chin rests on her hand, but everything about her posture is straightforward...
...But like Ma Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Lange's Migrant Mother is determined not to give in to despair...
...Uprooted trees rest on houses that seem as if they were built from a plywood kit...
...TODAY, WHEN we think of the hundreds of thousands of families who between 1935 and 1938 migrated to California after Dust Bowl conditions forced them off their farms in the Great Plains, we picture the men and women Dorothea Lange photographed during the years she worked for the New Deal's Farm Security Administration...
...In contrast to so many contemporary war photographers, who want museumgoers to feel guilty and shout from their positions of safety, "The horror, the horror...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
