Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to present the Canadian premiere of Robert Polidori’s critically acclaimed photographs of New Orleans. Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2006 these images capture the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods that devastated New Orleans. The exhibition features large-scale color photographs that Polidori created during four extended visits to New Orleans between September 2005 and April 2006. These quietly expressive images present a candid and intimate look at widespread destruction—an incomprehensible landscape of felled trees, houses washed off their foundations, and tumbled furniture. The images recall Susan Sontag’s affirmation in On Photography that “what renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.”
Michael Kimmelman wrote in the NY Times “It’s fashionable among some artists today to stage cinematic pictures that look gothic and otherworldly, like Hollywood film stills. Mr. Polidori found real barges lifted onto real embankments, bayous where streets used to be, insulation like rendered whale blubber in giant mounds on sidewalks, S.U.V.’s propped against houses like flying buttresses and bungalows crumpled like balls of paper.”
The book After the Flood by Robert Polidori, with an introduction by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Steidl, 333 pp. is available.
