“D4X9705: Lower Ninth Ward, Memory Loss,” by Stan Strembicki (2006)

Twenty years ago, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina arrived in New Orleans.

Photographer Stan Strembicki ’75, who has a long relationship with the city, arrived shortly after the storm to document the catastrophe, focusing on the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward. “As an artist,” he says, “I felt compelled to do something, anything. Where do you start when faced with an over-whelming event like Katrina—a city emptied and ruined?”

Strembicki began looking for “symbols of loss, [gravitating] to found photo albums, wedding albums, snapshots. These were something everyone had and understood. I brought along a 60 millimeter macro lens and made photographs of the objects I found, taking nothing with me but images.”

The resulting images of water-damaged photos became an ongoing project, “Memory Loss,” and can be seen in the recently released docuseries on Netflix, Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, in an episode directed by Spike Lee.

An emeritus professor of art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., Strembicki has exhibited his work internationally and has work in the permanent collections of museums in the Midwest and southern U.S.