More than half a million people lived in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. Two years later, only half have returned, and many are considering leaving again, this time forever, because of broken promises, soaring crime and murder, and the continuing inability of government to provide the most basic of services for its citizens. Along with September 11 and the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath will be remembered in history as a defining moment of the presidency of George W. Bush. The first was a raw, unprovoked attack, the second, a contentious war in a foreign land. Katrina, however, was no more, and no less, than the simple force and power of nature. No enemy, no politics, no combat. All societies and all peoples have always responded to natural disaster with rescue, comfort, and then reconstruction. But in New Orleans, the collapse of authorities at all levels led not just to disaster but to a catastrophe. Bodies were left in the streets for weeks and months. The sick, the elderly, the impoverished, those most helpless, were left to fend for themselves. Hundreds died, and many more suffered from heat, dehydration, lack of food, water, essential medication. The thousand deaths from the storm itself may not have been avoidable. But those who died because of neglect could easily have been saved. As a photographer, I covered conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia. Everywhere there are the familiar, almost predictable tableaux of horror and violence. But to witness such scenes on the streets of a major American city was nothing less than shocking. I grew up on and was educated with the epic images of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South of the 1950s and 1960s. I never thought that, a generation later, I would be photographing poor, and mostly black, Americans in what was, at its heart, a story of outright racism. Because that is what happened. When the emergency crews finally reached the flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans in strength, a week after the storm, they did so accompanied by armed guards, police, and soldiers, automatic weapons at the ready. There was more worry about looting and rioting than saving lives. It is hard to escape the conclusion that those in power had the wrong priorities in their response. The victims of Hurricane Katrina, however, never lost their dignity, nor their humanity, nor their capacity to help each other when no assistance was forthcoming from the outside. I hope that these photographs can show that as much as they indict failure.