My first sense of New Orleans as anything other than a place name on a map came from reading George Washington Cable’s short stories, “Old Creole Days” (1879), and his novel, “The Grandissimes” (1880), which are set in the city. I read A.J. Liebling’s “The Earl of Louisiana,” about three-time governor Earl Long (Huey’s brother) soon after it was published in the early 1960s. Both authors present New Orleans as a cosmopolitan city misplaced from the Mediterranean littoral, a town where sybaritic pleasures, casual violence, and political corruption are habitual. My one visit was during a miserably cold, damp November. So I approached “New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with something less than the artist’s affection for the city.

Robert Polidori was born in Canada in 1951, but lived in the Gentilly section of New Orleans as a teenager. He returned to the city soon after hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, and made a total of four trips to record the devastation. Mr. Polidori has a sweet tooth for urban destruction, having previously photographed Chernobyl, Ukraine, where the damage is nuclear; Havana, Cuba, where it is economic, and Beirut, Lebanon, where it is war related. He is an architectural photographer, but his main interest is in habitat, how people dwell in the structures they erect for themselves: There are no people in the pictures from New Orleans, so his camera notes evidence of the former occupants’ lives.

What a mess! “5417 Marigny Street, New Orleans, Louisiana” (March, 2006) is a living room that will never host company again. A folding table and a lamp have ended up on the sofa. A vacuum cleaner is on the chair. A broom lies across the arms of the chair and sofa, for all the good sweeping would do to remove the debris piled on the floor. The wallpaper is coming off the wall and there is a band of mold in splotches where it meets the ceiling. The ceiling is covered with mold except where parts of it have fallen, exposing the wooden struts and the insulation. The television set is under water. The picture is quite beautiful.

There was no electricity in New Orleans for artificial illumination, so Mr. Polidori had to make do with available light that required very long exposures, sometimes several seconds or more. This gave the negatives in his 5-inch-by-7-inch view camera plenty of time to record the minute details that are visible in the 34-inch-by-48-inch chromogenic prints. (All 24 pictures in the exhibition are in this format.) Light fills the room at 5417 Marigny Street, and paradoxically exposes its emptiness. This is the “poignancy of absence” that Jeff Rosenheim discusses in the introductory essay to the accompanying photo book, “After the Flood.”

But the picture is beautiful. The softly suffused light flatters the reds and pinks in the sofa, the lime green in the throw pillow, the pale blue in the baseball cap on the floor, and even the graygreen of the mold. It gives the peeling wallpaper a tactile quality. There are no clever camera angles in the exhibition: On Marigny Street, as elsewhere, Mr. Polidori planted himself squarely in front of his subject and shot straight ahead. This apparent (and only apparent) lack of artifice gives his pictures credibility. The combination of the veristic color and the matter-of-fact framing creates an image that is disconcertingly poised somewhere between photojournalism and art photography. After all, how beautiful do we want pictures of disaster to be?

“Vicinity of Jourdan and Surekote Streets, New Orleans, Louisiana” (January, 2006) looks along the side of a barge that settled on the front end of a school bus as the floodwaters subsided. The superstructure of the barge is a dull bluish red, the school bus, of course, is Crayola yellow, but the revelation is the beautiful patterning of the rust now exposed on the beached hull. We have to admire it even while tut-tutting the miscellaneous debris pilled up against the mangled cyclone fence in the foreground.

Similarly, in “Corner of Law and Egania Streets, New Orleans, Louisiana” (January, 2006) we are moved by the pale green slats that make up the siding of a house that was deposited athwart Egania Street, and by the clear blue of the winter sky that darkens as it rises from the horizon. In this understanding of the picture as an abstract combination of shapes and colors, the red of the bent stop sign propped against the house is an accent, and the complex crisscrossing of the overhead wires and of the telephone pole that supports them is a design complementary to the mass of the green building and the white building it abuts. It is only when we notice many wires are down, and other wires are ripping off part of the roof of the green building, and the jumble of rubbish and fallen branches in a heap beyond the white house, that we are reminded the occasion of the picture is a calamity.

Even in “5000 Cartier Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana”(September,2005), a picture of an ornate four-poster bed onto which the charred ceiling of the bedroom has fallen, we are distracted from our initial dismay by the browns and grays of the bed and ashes, the mottled greens of the walls, and the surreal dreamlike quality of the image.

My working definition of the difference between photojournalism and art photography is that in photojournalism the picture illustrates a story, but in art photography the picture is the story. The Met is not where we ordinarily go to get the news, but Robert Polidori has reported a major event in a way that is not out of place in a museum of art. As photojournalism, his work benefits from the close attention beauty insists be paid, and as art it is deepened by having a subject with which we are already engaged. The forces of nature, politics, and culture confront us in these artful pictures of a wrecked city.

Until December 10 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).