A Photographer Who Documented Katrina’s Destruction Returns to Take Pictures of the Exact Same Spots

This week marks the 10^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which ultimately killed at least 1,836 people, forced 1.5 million people to evacuate the region, and did an estimated $81 billion of property damage. In 2005, Carlos Barria documented the destruction. This year, he returned to locate some of the people he’d met.

He was able to track down a few of them but had difficulty finding others. To help him with his search, Barria had brought along some of the prints he had initially taken and began to revisit some of the locations captured in those images.

Barria began to play with the lines of the prints and how they fit into the modern-day locations, photographing them with the older images and capturing the differences 10 years later.

“The idea was to get exactly the same frame as then, lining up the print to compare the inundated city then with the New Orleans of today,” he wrote on the Reuters photo blog the Wider Image.

“It was very interesting going back to these places as I started to get a sense of what had happened to the people I met back then. Some had moved away, crossing state lines to start a new life elsewhere. Others were still there, in some cases partly because they lacked the opportunity to move away and start over.”