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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/opinion/hurricane-katrina-photos.html

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Guest Essay

Aug. 26, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

A two-story house reduced to rubble with two upstairs rooms exposed.

By Nathaniel Rich

Photographs by Richard Misrach

Mr. Rich, the author of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade,” has lived in New Orleans for 16 years. Mr. Misrach, a photographer based in California, traveled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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.