PHOTO ESSAY: 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, these then-and-now photos show the power of place

Audio By Carbonatix

The power of place is real.

In an increasingly virtual world, the physical spots where momentous things happened remain potent — and able to evoke some of our deepest-cutting moments.

That was the thinking behind these photos from New Orleans on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. By projecting images of places at some of their worst moments onto the way those places and neighborhoods appear now, something of a rudimentary visual time machine emerges.

The photos haunt. They bring back the chaos and fear of those jumbled days two decades ago. Images of moments captured and gone — water pushing up against buildings, makeshift memorials, empty roads with the projection of the days when people were using them in desperate bids to get out.

In one frame, the wreckage and rubble outside a house in 2005 is projected, at night, against the house as it stands today. In another, a woman, huddled up, wrapped in an American flag, braces herself against the elements and the world around him. Today, projected against a building, it is a phantom portal into another era.

Photography freezes and preserves moments. By having those moments touch time — reappearing in the city, in the spots where they happened in the first place — the power of the photos is magnified.

Remembering history is grounded in summoning the past in vivid and relevant ways. By bringing August 2005 in New Orleans to August 2025, a generation later, these photos show not only what disaster looked like, but what recovery and moving on look like as well.