Lot Essay
When Robert Polidori arrived in New Orleans after Katrina, 80 of the city was still under water. The series of photographs he produced on four separate trips document with clarity a painful moment in our country's history. The works were the subject of a dedicated show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 19, 2006- December 10, 2006 and a book was published under the same title: After The Flood.
Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote about the exhibition and writes specifically about this lot: "Consider the photograph of 2732 Orleans Avenue: a white house with green stoop next to a pink cottage with white stoop, under cloudy skies. Again, flat geometry, lacking melodrama: order is interrupted only by a white Ford at an angle before the white house, the subtlest of indicators that somethings awry, but enough. Stains left by the tide that apparently swept the car off the street clinch the image: they're discreet parallel brown bands stretching across the windshield and the clapboard, adding to the serendipity of compressed abstraction. The photograph meanwhile speaks volumes about life post-Katrina in New Orleans: the traditional shotgun houses, the people in one who cared to paint the shutters green, their neighbors with the air conditioner, the other neighbors who chose pink, what they have all lost and abandoned." (September 22, 2006)
Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote about the exhibition and writes specifically about this lot: "Consider the photograph of 2732 Orleans Avenue: a white house with green stoop next to a pink cottage with white stoop, under cloudy skies. Again, flat geometry, lacking melodrama: order is interrupted only by a white Ford at an angle before the white house, the subtlest of indicators that somethings awry, but enough. Stains left by the tide that apparently swept the car off the street clinch the image: they're discreet parallel brown bands stretching across the windshield and the clapboard, adding to the serendipity of compressed abstraction. The photograph meanwhile speaks volumes about life post-Katrina in New Orleans: the traditional shotgun houses, the people in one who cared to paint the shutters green, their neighbors with the air conditioner, the other neighbors who chose pink, what they have all lost and abandoned." (September 22, 2006)