Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005] Possibly 2005 - 2010

Richard Misrach captured this photographic print titled, *Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005]*. It seems like the image itself came into being through the devastation and grief caused by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder what Misrach was thinking when he shot this; the desire to show people what happened to a place and its people, to capture the strange mundanity of the aftermath. The ordinary suburban home; the tangle of debris; the sign. And then there’s the material aspect of the photo itself, the play of light and shadow. The muted colours speak to the emotional toll of the disaster; that grey and the brown just sucks the life out of everything. Misrach’s photograph feels like an exchange of ideas across time. I bet he thought about Walker Evans and other photographers who captured the Dust Bowl. It embodies a certain ambiguity, and it is open to interpretation as a record of an historic event.