Francis Cape had gone to New Orleans to work at the Louisiana State Museum. One of their buildings had a damaged roof, and the contents were being moved to temporary storage in Baton Rouge. His walk took him through an area that was not the dramatic Lower Ninth Ward of media coverage. Gentilly, a middle class neighborhood of ordinary homes, could be anywhere in America. He saw two or three families clearing their homes, a few cars passed. Wanting to photograph the ordinariness and silence, Cape focussed on the waterline which, together with the army’s paint markings listing date and body count, acted as a sign rather than a description of what had happened. More obvious in some photographs than others, the presence of the waterline accumulates during the viewing.

The paneling of the wainscot is that pressed “random board” sheet paneling so common throughout the US in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Often subsequently painted over, it appears as such in one of the photographs, and unpainted in another. The wainscot establishes a strong horizontal line using an architectural element that works against the distancing effect of the exhibition space.