HOUSTON, TX.- American photographer Richard Misrach (b. 1949) gave 69 Katrina photographs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in May 2010, which will be on view for the first time this summer. Focusing on the graffiti left by New Orleans evacuees, Richard Misrach: After Katrina reveals a range of individual reactions, giving a human face to the wreckage.

Misrach shot the Katrina photographs between October and December 2005 with a 4 MP pocket camera. Richard Misrach: After Katrina, on view August 7 —October 31, marks the gift of the photographs to the MFAH and Katrina´s five-year anniversary.

"These photographs were given not just to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, but also to the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the New Orleans Museum of Art," said Yasufumi Nakamori, MFAH assistant curator of photography. "Their display around the nation allows us to collectively reflect on the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, remember its impact on New Orleans and its citizens and rejoice in human resiliency."

The MFAH and the New Orleans Museum of Art will display the photographs during the same timeframe, with additional museums to exhibit the works at a later date.

Misrach is credited with helping to pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation in the 1970s. For over three decades, he has been chronicling human intervention in landscape, and is most well known for the Desert Cantos series exhibited at his 1996 mid-career retrospective at MFAH. His work is in the permanent collections of the MFAH and other institutions, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago.