David Graham, Almost Paradise (Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans)

Graham’s photographs lend a surreal quality to identifiable objects. In his photograph of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, debris, wood, and sheet metal are strewn around a female mannequin. The artist’s cropping of the image makes it difficult to discern the scale of the figure, and her exaggerated features seem out of place amid the destruction.