Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, three Army Corp of Engineer levees failed. The largest human-made disaster in the U.S. was in motion: 750 million people were under a mandatory evacuation order, and the National Guard patrolled the darkened, flooded streets of the city.

I arrived in the city 30 days later to document the catastrophe. I sped past roadblocks on the interstate with a magnetic sign on my truck that said, “Disaster Assessment Relief Team.” Once there, I was stunned by empty streets, cops with machine guns, and the smell of rot, mold, and death. I didn’t have it in me to respond as a photojournalist. The spectacle the news made of ruined properties and homeowners’ reactions was too much—peddling tragedy for ratings was repulsive to my way of thinking.

To respond appropriately, I needed moral guidelines: No photos of victims in the ruins of their homes; I would not photograph private spaces. Public spaces were ok, and I would not remove anything from where I found it. Any photography would happen on-site, not later in the studio. What I needed was a metaphor that would stand-in for all that was lost.

I found it near a library in the lower 9th ward where the flood had scattered books all over a nearby field. Libraries stand for everything we know and have accumulated, and here it all was, decaying due to tragedy. I photographed these books as they rotted back into the landscape. Over time the earth began to take them back, and the project ended after five years when the field was bulldozed. These images are about these vessels’ fragile nature containing our combined culture—the books we find in a library.