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His photos of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans' long road back from the disaster, collected in a forthcoming book, say the same thing, only more powerfully so. Shot over the course of 15 visits to the Crescent City, they take the measure of the recovery by reducing it to single, evocative frames: children playing on the same street where volunteers had massed amid wreckage; a sign in front of a cemetery asking for information on coffins that, five years later, remain unidentified.
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Tama has also said he returned to New Orleans so many times to document the road back from the hurricane because he wanted to make sure the people he met during the storm "weren't forgotten."
John Fitzhugh, a photographer for the Biloxi Sun Herald, provides a different reminder in his own series of then-and-now pictures, which show the devastation that Katrina also wrought on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. "Our comparative images render visual what memory itself cannot be relied upon to recall," Fitzhugh wrote in an essay published by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation.
Photographs such as his and Tama's serve, too, to document that Hurricane Katrina will continue to shape thousands of lives long after this five-year anniversary passes.
Katrina: Then and Now
Two men paddle in high water by the bridge crossing the Industrial Canal to the Lower Ninth Ward on Aug. 31, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and became one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
Today, cars travel over the same bridge. Of the roughly 5,000 residents who used to live in the Lower Ninth Ward, only a quarter have returned, according to an analysis by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
The devastated Lower Ninth Ward on Aug. 25, 2005. The storm surge came through breaches in the Industrial Canal flood protection system, flooding buildings and smashing them to pieces.
The Lower Ninth Ward today. This two-square-mile area now has the largest collection of the greenest homes in the world, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.
Robert Fontaine walks past his burning house in New Orleans' Seventh Ward on Sept. 6, 2005. "My whole life, my whole world crashed. For everyone, not just for me," he said later.
Fontaine today. He said he had been staying in the house to take care of dogs who were left behind. He had been using candles due to a lack of electricity when one of the dogs knocked over a candle, causing the fire.
Stranded victims on Sept. 2, 2005, inside the Superdome. The arena sheltered thousands of flooded-out residents after Hurricane Katrina and became a symbol of the storm's tragedy and devastation.
The New Orleans Saints during a preseason game against the Houston Texans at the Superdome this month. The stadium reopened in 2007 after a $200 million repair and renovation project.
The storm overwhelmed the levee system and flooded 80 percent of the city, caused about 1,800 deaths. Here, workers rebuild a levee breached along the Industrial Canal in April 2006.
The reconstructed levee wall today. Congress has ordered the construction of a ring of 350 miles of linked levees, flood walls, gates and pumps, which surrounds the city.
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