Eye of the Storm

Several days ago, the first photographs showing the damage from Hurricane Katrina were published here in the American press. They were oddly disquieting, but mostly just enigmatic: one photo in particular showed the partially submerged houses of a residential city block, their red roofs appearing like floating trapezoids in a grey, murky sea. The image itself resembled a kind of environmental art piece — a Robert Smithson installation, for instance, or some sort of Christo and Jeanne Claude experiment. Its beauty lay in its otherworldliness, its tone of kooky mystery...

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