Photo by Dave Humphreys

The first time he took a camera into the Atchafalaya Basin in the early seventies, CC Lockwood had never taken a photograph in his home state professionally. “Time/Life were doing a book called The Bayous—one in a series of books about wilderness areas,” recalled the celebrated photographer and environmentalist. “My stock picture agent in New York City called and asked for some photos from the Bayou Pigeon area of the Atchafalaya. I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

But that was a Tuesday and they needed the pictures by Friday—an impossibility in the pre-digital, pre- FedEx era. Lockwood went out to photograph anyway. He spent two weeks driving the basin’s levee, using a canoe to gain his first glimpses into the unseen wilderness beyond. “I was two years out of LSU and had been photographing in the Rocky Mountains and the Everglades. I was focused on places that were exotic to me at the time. I didn’t realize what Louisiana meant to me until I saw the Atchafalaya.”

It was the beginning of a love affair that’s lasted forty years. “I was smitten with it. Between 1972 and 1980 I spent a hundred days a year out there,” said Lockwood, his voice still conveying the awe of the young photographer who discovered America’s largest river basin swamp lying just beyond his doorstep.

In 1975, when the One American Place building opened in downtown Baton Rouge, Lockwood showed an exhibit of thirty-five Atchafalaya photographs in the lobby. “Hundreds of Baton Rougeans came through,” recalled Lockwood, “and they looked at the photos and kept saying ‘I didn’t know that was out there …’ ”

No one did. Sure, the residents of the little towns around the perimeter fished and hunted their local waters, but the inner basin was virtually uninhabited. “Between Morgan City and the Mississippi River I knew of five full-time residents,” said Lockwood of the place he came to know in the seventies. “One couple and three single men … in an area of about 1.4 million acres.”

The majestic solitude inspired him to environmental activism, and Lockwood discovered that his photographs could have the power to preserve. In the seventies and eighties he was one of a determined band of activists who fought to block a Corps of Engineers plan to deepen the Atchafalaya River channel threefold to create a pressure release valve for the Mississippi River. The project would have drained the basin and converted it into farmland in the process (The Corps abandoned the project in the eighties.).

After hundreds of visits and thousands of photographs, Lockwood can be said to have introduced millions to the Atchafalaya Basin’s teeming, solitary grandeur. Despite the changes he’s seen during four decades (Bad: exotic plant encroachment; attempts to correct the hydrology that fix one problem while creating another. Good: more public pressure to keep the basin wild; establishment of public refuge and hunting lands as a buffer against heavily populated areas around it.), these days Lockwood feels as if the basin’s in a pretty good place.

And though he might not get out there a hundred days a year, he still loves to visit. “My favorite part is the cypress-tupelo swamp,” he said. “The area north of Flat Lake has a lot of that habitat. If I don’t have another place to go for a particular reason, I’ll head down there. We have a saying: ‘Keep the Atchafalaya Basin Wild and Free.’ To me, being so big and with so few people out there, it’s just wonderful.”

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