Exhibition dates: September 19 – December 10, 2006
To mark the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods that devastated New Orleans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori. On view from September 19 through December 10 in The Howard Gilman Gallery, the exhibition will feature approximately 20 large-scale color photographs made by Robert Polidori on four extended visits to New Orleans between September 2005 and April 2006. The quietly expressive photographs present a candid and intimate look at widespread urban ruin — an incomprehensible, topsy-turvy landscape of felled oak trees, houses washed off their foundations, and tumbled furniture that leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.
The exhibition is made possible by Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen.
Polidori is drawn to record the disasters of our time and the failures of contemporary society. In his New Orleans photographs, as in his previous work in Havana, Versailles, and Chernobyl, he eschews nostalgia for the poignancy of absence.
In a city that itself resembles a lost civilization, wrecked rooms, caved-in houses,
and ravaged neighborhoods become metaphors for the fragility of human life.
"Having lived in New Orleans as a teenager, I felt compelled to return to the city to bear witness to the stunning scope of the crisis and to ensure that the city and its citizens will not be forgotten," he commented. "My photographs of New Orleans's flooded homes reduced to rotting debris speak to the personal and collective loss suffered by the local population."
In these disturbing scenes, Polidori finds a formal beauty that radiates stillness and compassion and invites contemplation. Using a large-format camera, natural light, and unusually long exposures, Polidori records the domestic destruction with a mastery of color, light, shadow, and texture that makes the discarded mementos and mud-caked belongings all too palpable. In each work, the artist seems to have caught on film the very air of New Orleans, weighted heavily with mold, humidity, and history.
Robert Polidori (b. 1951, Montreal, Canada) is one of the world's premier architectural photographers. He received the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2002, and the World Press Award for Art in 1998. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and other notable institutions, and he is a staff photographer for the New Yorker. His recent photographs of New Orleans are documented in the book After the Flood (Steidl, 2006), which features an introduction by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum.
New Orleans after the Flood is organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim.
The exhibition is featured on the Museum's Web site at www.metmuseum.org.
An eight-minute audio podcast of Robert Polidori speaking about his photographs of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, with an introduction by Jeff Rosenheim, is available at www.metmuseum.org/polidori.
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