“You’d better turn on CNN; looks like your house is on fire.”

Photographer Thomas Neff entered the city in the first days after Katrina as a volunteer first responder. He soon began taking large-format black and white photographs and writing down the stories of natives he found marooned there, when the city was eighty percent under water. In these intimate, intense pictures, we see individuals who, though exhausted by grief and shock, are defiant, spontaneous, and resourceful. We see people reorganizing their lives, maintaining their individuality, their souls, their humor, and their culture—their citizenship in New Orleans.