Three years after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, it’s easy to forget the harrowing intensity of the storm and its aftermath. Since then, we’ve had other kinds of storms to consider, from Hurricane Ike in Texas to the current credit crisis that’s sending a tsunami of panic around the world.

Rodriguez, a photojournalist who’s previously covered imprisoned youth and Los Angeles gang members, followed families who relocated to Texas after Katrina laid waste to their homes in New Orleans. Along the way, he found a host of fascinating characters. There’s the aptly-named Katrina Robinson, a woman with a prosthetic eye whose two teenage sons have both been left wounded – one of them paralyzed – by gun violence. There’s Earl Truvia, who spent 27 years in prison after being wrongly convicted for murder, and who now works to reduce gun violence among youth in New Orleans. There’s Sergeant Luke Kennedy, a New Orleans police officer who writes poetry to deal with the strain of police work in the Big Not-so-Easy.

The images Rodriguez captures aren’t particularly artful or eye-catching. (If that’s your preference, check out Robert Polidori’s haunting images of abandoned houses in New Orleans, “After the Flood,” or Chris Jordan’s equally charged images of abandoned objects in “In Katrina’s Wake.”) Instead, they’re raw, even a little ragged at the edges. But their direct, unmediated quality gives them a feeling of immense authenticity. Rodriguez has a gift for blending into his surroundings and capturing intimate moments, as he does in several images of Hilda Hendricks, a middle-aged woman who tries, without luck, to stop looters from stealing bits of her broken-down home. These are devastating portraits of a woman disintegrating under pressure, even as she tries – literally – to nail down the fragile pieces of her life. 

“Still Here” is remarkable in other ways too. In this historic election season, the book strikes a timely note, reminding us that race was a huge factor in the Katrina story. Needless to say, almost all of Rodriguez’s subjects are African-American. One of the only white faces in the book belongs to Christy Butler, the director of a children’s ministry at the First Baptist Church in Denton, Texas, who organized entertainment for evacuees’ children. Butler comes across as gracious, compassionate, and race-blind – but she’s unusual. A predominantly white community, Denton was challenged by its sudden influx of refugees. Rodriguez documents how some residents fell back on racial stereotypes, blaming refugees for not “getting back up on their feet” within weeks, no matter their huge handicaps. 

Still, Rodriguez seems to say, the capacity for survival and grit among the evacuees was strong. The book’s title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, which announces triumphantly, “I’ve been scarred and battered/My hopes the wind done scattered… But I don’t care!/I’m still here!” But while celebrating the fortitude of the human spirit, the book isn’t a sentimental hymn to human endurance. Of the evacuees whose stories are told here, some fare better than others: Rudy Williams finds work as a butcher in Denton and decides to stay, while Joseph Lawrence winds up in a friend’s garage in New Orleans, smoking crack to dull his anxiety. Rodriguez offers these subjects to us objectively, letting the images and interviews speak for themselves. It’s a richly nuanced portrait of a group of people who, by and large, maintained their dignity while everything around them crumbled.