On the Cover: "Coton Jaune"
Photo by Nathan Tucker
For his photo essay, “Looming Solastalgia," photojournalist Nathan Tucker confronted his anxieties about the changing cultural and physical landscapes of Louisiana by seeking out individuals at the heart of the quiet movement to revive the cultivation and use of Louisiana’s heritage textile crop, brown cotton, traditionally known as coton jaune. Pictured is Larry Allain, holding the distinctly-colored crop, now mostly forgotten in Acadiana, that once made up the clothing, blankets, and bags of every rural home. Allain, a member of the collective Acadiana Brown Cotton, is a retired grasslands botanist and prairie scientist with grand visions for a regenerative, rehabilitated future for the dwindling Cajun prairie—visions that play out in real time on his property, where heirloom peas intertwine with coton jaune throughout. He and other members of the collective have dedicated much of their lives to reaching into the past for long-lost agricultural and artisan weaving techniques the modern day has little use for. Or at least believes it has no use for. As Tucker puts it, “Today, in a world that has little time or need for products that require so many hours, such care, that seed is serving us in a new way entirely: it is helping us to remember.”