Between September 3-11, 2005, photographer Larry Towell, accompanied by Southern novelist Ace Atkins, traveled along the coast of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, documenting the dramatic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Towell's haunting and poetic landscapes - many of them panoramas - depict the devastation, and the lives of some of the people hit by it. This is an intimate, documentary record of the hurricane's impact and a tribute to human endurance. For his afterword, Ace Atkins revisited the same scenes six months later, reflecting on if and how the communities of the coast have been able to recover.
I have been getting more into photo collection books lately. This was remarkable, and something about the disaster photos taken in Biloxi was so compelling, and tragic. The afterword written by Ace Atkins was beautifully done.