Opinion | ‘It Was Unlike Anything I’d Ever Seen:’ Hurricane Katrina, 20 Years Later

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall 20 years ago in the coastal marsh near Buras, La., Richard Misrach was where he has been for much of the last four decades: with his wife, Myriam, in a Volkswagen camper in the desert near California’s Salton Sea. While photographing expansive vistas of dunes and sky and cracked lake bed for his Desert Cantos series, he was haunted by reports of the brutality unfolding some 1,500 miles away. The desert, he decided, could wait. The couple packed up a large-format eight-by-10-inch view camera and film sheets and aimed the camper east on Interstate 10.

The Misrachs trundled into a city that looked “like a movie set for the end of the world,” Mr. Misrach told me in a recent interview. The streets glittered with nails and shattered glass; the VW camper busted a tire, and then another. The air smelled of stagnant waste and black mold. Many of the missing dead had yet to be recovered. The Misrachs secured a bed at a hospital, in a wing reserved for the families of cancer patients. It was hard to buy food, so they ate out of a box shipped by Mr. Misrach’s father that contained packages of nuts and yogurt cartons. Myriam left almost immediately.

Flashing a press pass at National Guard barricades, Mr. Misrach was one of the few civilians able to move freely around the desolate city. He carried his tripod and view camera, a cumbersome, accordionlike device that dates to the Victorian era, as well as a small digital camera — his first, given to him by his gallerist. Most of the time he was alone.

“If people were there,” he said, “I would have photographed them.” But people weren’t. They had fled to Houston; to Shreveport, La.; to Atlanta; they were huddled in toxic evacuation camps; they were missing; they were dead. So he photographed what they had left behind: eviscerated houses, disgorged swimming pools, a depressed and dismembered mannequin and cars that appeared to have been cast about by a toddler in a tantrum: belly-up, belly to belly, careening off roofs, into sidewalks, into front doors. It was the shrapnel of an explosion primed by a century of venal and shortsighted decisions. As the historian Andy Horowitz has shown, Katrina was a disaster that came not from the Gulf of Mexico but from within.

Mr. Misrach returned twice in the coming months, wandering from New Orleans up the Gulf Coast. He took around 1,000 photographs with his view camera, an extravagantly time- and labor-intensive process, and many more with his digital camera. He had no set plan or itinerary; he did not know what he would find. He felt only a duty to fix the moment in time.

“It wasn’t lyrical. It wasn’t romantic,” he said. “But it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.” Most important, he knew what he wanted to avoid: “I didn’t want be part of the news cycle.” The way to ensure this, he decided, would be to put away his photographs for 20 years. (Five years after Katrina, Mr. Misrach exhibited a subset of the ones he had taken with the digital camera.)

The initial impression given by the large-format photographs is of things in places they shouldn’t be: A picnic table on a roof. A door marionetted by electrical wire. A boat in the air.

This discordance is a common theme of post-disaster photography, in which a quotidian past coexists with a nightmarish present. They recall the ash-coated toy ambulance on the floor of an abandoned classroom in Joel Meyerowitz’s “Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive,” say, or the deflated basketballs in Robert Polidori’s portrait of a disintegrating gymnasium in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The jarring juxtapositions whiplash the viewer between bleak slapstick (the car is on the roof!) and horror (the car is on the roof). They invite us to inhabit the harmony of a life since exploded. But two decades have, as Mr. Misrach predicted, recomposed the images in ways he could not have imagined.

Images of radical demolition no longer seem exceptional. We are, 20 years on, more frequently visited by disasters that, as Henry Darger wrote of a storm, are “tremendous beyond all man’s conception, immeasurable beyond all man’s conception, immeasurable beyond measure.” Only about seven months have passed since the most destructive wildfire in the history of Los Angeles. The year 2025 is on track to be the second or third hottest ever recorded. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that hurricane activity this season will be “above normal” — like each of the last nine.

The eeriness of Mr. Misrach’s photographs has even greater psychic resonance here in New Orleans, and not only because residents understand that every hurricane season may be their last. New Orleans, after all, is a city in a place it shouldn’t be: an “impossible but inevitable city,” in the geographer Peirce Lewis’s phrase. Built on sinking mud, encroached by water on every side, the city has lived in defiant disharmony with its surroundings for three centuries. Its presence in a growing, and now dying, coastal marshland has always looked a little like this:

The local connotation of inevitable has shifted in the last decade, however. It may now be inevitable, according to scientists at Tulane and elsewhere, that the Gulf of Mexico will leap up beyond the I-10 corridor within the century.

In July, about a month before the 20th anniversary of Katrina, the state of Louisiana took decisive action to accelerate that timeline. It announced that the single project most capable of delaying New Orleans’ sunken future — a planned diversion of the Mississippi River just south of New Orleans, the most critical innovation of the $50 billion Coastal Master Plan designed after Katrina to preserve the eroding coast — was canceled. Yielding to pressure from a vocal constituency of fishermen in the southernmost reaches of Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry warned last year that the project would “break our culture.”

In this context, Mr. Misrach’s images assume an uneasy new dimension. How long will it take for these visions of the past, unmoored from historical context, to be mistaken for visions of the future? In Mr. Misrach’s photographs, things are not where they should be, we are not where we should be and nobody, not in the frame or beyond it, is able to put things right.

Photographs via Pace Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade” and teaches in the environmental studies program at Tulane and is a 2025 Guggenheim fellow. Richard Misrach lives and works in California; his most recent work, “Cargo,” documents ships in San Francisco Bay during a critical moment for the global shipping industry.

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