I was looking at photographer Robert Polidori's images of Versailles for a post on my Decluttered Creative blog when I noticed that he has also photographed New Orleans after Katrina. The first image that comes up in that sampling is a photograph of a bedroom on Deslondes Street. (Find the image here: I don't want to reproduce it without permission.)
A photograph of what was once a bedroom, I should have said: for of course, by the time Polidori photographed it, it was a bedroom no more. That's one of the things the photograph was about: the collision (it's far too strong to be just a "contrast") between what it had been—pink, feminine, with a little chandelier hanging from the ceiling and fanciful drapes on the window—and what it had become.
There has already been extraordinary writing done about New Orleans, and surely there will be more, about Katrina then and the oil spill now. But sometimes, this image reminded me, the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is true. Though photographs are just as manipulated, just as mediated as prose, they have the advantage of being able to exhibit a reality without also having to explain it. Polidori's photograph is so powerful precisely because viewers like me know nothing at all about the room, the house, the street, or any of their residents. We know the macrocosm, of Katrina, and the microcosm, of this single room; of all that is in the middle of the two, Polidori explains nothing, allowing us instead to witness from our place of unknowing.
I was humbled by this photograph, and inspired by it. It made me want to revisit the images in my own work in progress, and to shape them better than I have been doing.
In the hands of someone like Polidori, a picture is a thousand words...or ten thousand, or more.
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