Robert Polidori, 6539 Canal Street, New Orleans, March 2006, courtesy of Flowers East Gallery, London

I can get easily absorbed into almost any one of Robert Polidori's large-format hyper-real images, especially when I see them on a gallery wall. At the other end of the "big picture" approach, however, is the up-close and intimate lingering gaze. The tighly cropped images of flood-damaged family photo albums and discarded books that photographer Stan Strembecki made on location in New Orleans in November 2005 took me by surprise with their lasting emotional power. Please take a look at his portfolio at Lens Culture.