I was visiting my family in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina grew in the Gulf of Mexico and headed toward my hometown. Like thousands of others, I evacuated the city with my family. Soon afterwards I returned to my home in Amsterdam.

It wasn’t long before I was flying back to New Orleans to see how I could help. As the plane approached the airport, I saw roofs covered with blue tarps everywhere; when I reached uptown, refrigerators with cryptic messages lined the streets. I knew then that words alone would not adequately capture the devastation wrought to the city, so the day after I arrived I bought a new digital camera. Little did I know that purchase would re-ignite my passion for art, and that I’d develop a new love interest—photography.

In the year after Katrina, I traveled from Amsterdam to New Orleans six times, each time documenting what I saw. Indeed, photographing the devastation became an obsession—I felt compelled to capture nearly every affront I saw. In the beginning I used a wide-angle lens, shooting the debris against the bluest of skies, which had a haunting, beautiful quality. Later I became more interested in capturing macro shots of the destruction or in singling in on one item, which in some way began to represent the whole awful thing to me. 

I was also drawn to capture messages left on people’s storefronts, homes, and cars. As I drove around the city, often I’d see a scene, one which looked like it had been set up for a movie, but often it was my fellow New Orleanians messages to one another—sometimes the message was one of anger, other times sadness and often one of a determination to rebuild. My favorite scenes were ones in which the sense of humor resonated.

Telling the story of my city became an obsession as well and so a year after Katrina, together with two artists from New Orleans, we had a show in the United States Senate. To mark the 5th anniversary of Katrina, I worked with designer Tom Varisco, the Louisiana State Museum and the University of New Orleans Press to launch a book (published in 2010) and international traveling exhibition entitled, Before (During) After: Louisiana Photographers Visual Reactions to Hurricane Katrina.