For Franklin Sirmans, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Joshua Mann Pailet’s Imagine It Clean (2005) is a defining image of Katrina. “This is the immediate aftermath. It’s the morning after, and the morning after in the French Quarter could be messy, but this is not that. The real chaos is already being modified by an irony suggestive of the true horror to come in this slice of civic promotional advertising perfectly captured by Pailet.”
