Will Steacy traveled to New Orleans in October 2005. Over the course of the next year he made numerous lengthy trips to the city, photographing what Hurricane Katrina had left in its wake, the moldering houses and abandoned belongings of residents who had fled or perished. He also photographed residents who had remained in the city or returned to rebuild. His pictures chronicle lives that have ended and lives that are beginning anew, existences fading into obscurity and reconstituting themselves, everyday relics ejected from their proper places and preserved as mementos of a different city, one that persists in memory as much as in reality.

Many of Steacy’s photographs document snapshots and Polaroids found by the artist in the most heavily impacted parts of the city—images distorted and effaced by the storm and subsequent exposure to the elements, portraits of families and friends on the verge of being erased from history. The work presented here alights on, and sometimes arrests, a city undergoing a transition with no final form and no end in sight.