In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge overwhelmed New Orleans’s levee system, the catastrophe has lived in the public imagination as a parade of dramatic images. Often overlooked are smaller, more gradual changes. For years, David G. Spielman has documented these inconspicuous changes, in haunting images whose simplicity evokes the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks.

“The great photographer David Spielman captured the essence of hope and despair in his powerful pictures of Katrina’s devastation. But he never put his Leica down, because he knows that after ten years the recovery of his beloved city is both amazing and incomplete. The result is this poignant portrait of rebirth and blight, perfect for an artist who’s a master of black and white.”
     —Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and best-selling author

“As strangely beautiful as the encroaching vines that still enshroud whole rows of houses ten years after Katrina, David Spielman’s astonishing photographs speak with a quiet but forceful eloquence—of devastation and abandonment, of perseverance and renewal.”
     —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

About the author:
David G. Spielman is a fine-art and commercial photographer and a freelance photojournalist who has photographed presidents and other world leaders at reconciliation conferences on four continents. In 1997 he was awarded an artist’s residency at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. His photographs have been collected in Southern Writers (1997); Katrinaville Chronicles: Images and Observations from a New Orleans Photographer (2007); and When Not Performing: New Orleans Musicians (2012). New Orleans has been his home for more than forty years.