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The Historic New Orleans Collection
Black and white photograph of the abandoned Robert R. Moton Elementary School gymnasium. The space is littered with trash and graffiti covers the walls.

The Katrina Decade

Images of an Altered City

by David G. Spielman, photographer
with essays by Jack Davis and John H. Lawrence 

In haunting images, David G. Spielman documents small, often overlooked changes to New Orleans in the years since Hurricane Katrina.

Black and white photo of a historic house at a street corner, surrounded by trees and power lines. The image is on the cover of a book titled The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City by David G. Spielman.

The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City

HNOC 2015
hardcover • 9" × 9" • 168 pp.
138 b&w images
ISBN 978-0-917860-68-3

$39.95

In the 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 images whose simplicity evokes the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks.

A leaning, two-story wooden house with visible damage and Gas Cut Off painted on the front. The structure appears abandoned, with broken windows and an unkempt yard, under a cloudy sky.

PrAISE for THE KATRINA DECADE

“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.”

“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.”

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