I always believe you have to show the symbolism of a civilization, whether it be the cave drawings or somebody drawing in the sand in Darfur to show a massacre.
When you live in the country or the state it's important to remember that you must be objective. Personal feelings must be put aside - you are there to document and tell the story and come back safely.
These are the kind of things I always zero in. When I was in Rwanda, it was the same thing. You're always zeroing in those details. Not just always the bodies, but what makes up the human being.
For me what was amazing was consumerism of people survived after Katrina. You see in a yard that the SUV is gone but they left the Ferrari or the more expensive car because it just wasn't practical. They couldn't get all their stuff in it. So you see this beautiful car totally destroyed; motorcycles. You walk into these houses - we were with the New Orleans police when they would go into the houses - we'd go through these houses and we were just amazed at how much stuff that had been accumulated and how much was left behind.
You have this kind of cross between abandonment and savior, and I think it's going to show that how a government as powerful as America is was able to drop the ball so badly, then maybe it can be used as a textbook in the future.
One of the most amazing things that came out of 9/11 was all the pictures taken by amateurs, by people just going to work or coming or saw what was going on and took it. But all forms and various types of cameras, and when you look at that body of work you just see the impact of how photography is - when I taught once, I said that you have to be ready now for any event.
For me, Katrina was my first trip back to the United States, but the most important thing, it showed everything that I had seen in other places. As I've said before, it looked like a bomb had hit a lot of places. I'd never seen such force, and it was Mother Nature.
As George Bush's infamous for once saying by mistake, he said, "Mother Nature is a terrorist." So it was with Katrina - the devastation of it, when you think of bombs being dropped on people and then you think that a hurricane could come through and do that, the same amount of damage, it was a wake-up call in a lot of ways.
