In recent days, the photographer Mike Osborne has been in Houston, Texas, documenting the interior devastation of homes hit by Hurricane Harvey. The storm, which killed dozens of people this week and displaced tens of thousands of Texans from their homes, rained up to fifty inches of water in some areas. To take these photographs, Osborne sometimes stood inside the flooded homes, wading in water that reached up to his waist. The images show the wreckage of the flooding, which impaired foundations and wreaked havoc on appliances, television sets, and home décor in neighborhoods both affluent and poor. They also document the efforts of homeowners to salvage whatever belongings they could. In one grimly evocative image from a home in the Legend Lane Townhomes complex, a gated community, a framed Renoir print of two women riding a skiff across the idyllic blue Seine is propped atop a table in a living space submerged in gray stormwaters. Osborne told me that these scenes were “a very difficult thing to look at, and to encounter firsthand is certainly more palpable than the images are capable of conveying.” He added that it was a new experience for him, “as a photographer and just as a human,” to experience the storm’s devastation at the same time that its victims did.
Melissa Welikson is a former digital photo editor at The New Yorker.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Amy Davidson Sorkin
The Smoke from Hurricane Harvey: Looking Beyond the Crosby Chemical-Plant Explosion
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Video
Hurricane Harvey Strikes Hard
Scenes from Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey—the first Category 4 storm to hit the U.S. mainland in more than ten years.
Personal History
Catching the Fire Bug
I set out to fight fires—then discovered that I loved them.
By M. R. O’Connor