In the Wake of Katrina

Book excerpt: Between September 3 and 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 are not loud news pictures, but haunting and poetic landscapes-many of them panoramas-as well as photographs that depict the lives of ordinary people amidst the devastation. It is an intimate, documentary record of the hurricane's impact and a tribute to human endurance. For his afterword, Ace Atkins revisits the scenes of Towell's photographs nine months on, reflecting on how the communities of the coast have been able to rebuild their lives.