[Photographing in New Orleans]

One misty morning I was photographing in New Orleans' Ninth Ward neighborhood, a few blocks from where one of the levees had failed only ten weeks earlier. Squatting on a driveway in the foul-smelling mud, I was focusing my lens on a red Christmas ornament stuck in the front gate of a flooded home. I stood up to stretch my back and noticed a man sitting alone on some concrete steps a few houses down. He was the only person I had seen for hours; the empty blocks were otherwise as oppressively still and silent as a bombed-out war zone. I left my camera and made my way across the debris-strewn street toward him. As I approached, I saw he was elderly—a tall, slender black man with a pointed chin and lean, burnished arms and hands.

I asked him if this was his neighborhood. He told me his great-grandfather had built this house in the 1890s, his grandfather was born and died in this house, his father was born and died in this house, "and seventy-six years ago I was born in this house." He pointed behind him to where the front door should have been. The entire house and all of its contents were gone, swept away in the flood and smashed together with uprooted trees and overturned cars and the splintered remains of other houses into an immense pile of grey rubble a quarter of a mile away. There was nothing left on his property but the heavy cement steps he was sitting on and a few cinder blocks and grimy debris.

"They're paying for me to stay in a motel room in Kansas City," he told me. "It stinks of smoke and I don't know anyone. I lost my wife a couple of years ago . . ." He pointed down the block to a small, white building that was pushed off its foundation into the middle of the street, twisted sideways with its back torn open. "That's my church. The people are all gone. There used to be people . . ." His voice stopped as he gestured out at his ruined community.

After a pause I asked him what he was going to do. "Same thing I've always done," he said, "sit on my front steps. I don't belong anywhere else. I'm not going to rot away in some motel. This is where I am from and this is what I do—I sit on my front steps—so here I am sitting on my front steps."