Lake Pontchartrain, Toward the Causeway

A second view of Lake Pontchartrain, the vast shallow lake above New Orleans. The lake has shaped the city's history as much as the Mississippi has — it has flooded New Orleans more than once, most catastrophically in 2005, and the levees and seawalls along its southern shore are part of the daily life of the city that lives below its level.

Photographed on Lake Pontchartrain in 1997, in black and white — well before the storm that would change the lake's place in the national imagination. A different, quieter moment on the same enormous water.