Relics 2015: Crying Cocodrie
At the edge of Louisiana with a coastal photography class
I distinctly remember three things about my first visit to Cocodrie as a child: swarming gnats, friendly people, and my first raw oyster. My second visit, as an adult in May 2015, was a markedly different experience. This time I had journeyed to the end of La. Highway. 56 to learn about the marsh and a couple of the barrier islands that once made up Isle Dernière—Last Island. Though just for a day, I was helping to document the coastal land loss affecting the landscape, livelihoods, communities, and culture of the area. Heading out into the wetlands with a group of photographers, I could see for miles over the flat landscape. We passed dead oak trees scattered in now salty marsh grasses, a couple of abandoned fishing camps like this one, and far more open water than the locals remember seeing just a few years ago. As the dark clouds of a threatening storm rolled in and two fishermen in a nearby skiff headed back to shore, an overwhelming feeling of isolation came over me. This special part of Louisiana really felt like the “end of the road” as some people say—the edge of Louisiana. But for how much longer can it hold on? —Ashley Herrick
A biologist, a ceramicist, and a faction of students were bobbing through a Louisiana estuary—rapt observers all—when Ashley Herrick lined up her shot of an old fishing camp near collapse.
The group traveled as the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium’s (LUMCON) coastal landscape photography workshop, an annual, one-week course led by Dr. Gary LaFleur of Nicholls State University (the biologist) and Dr. Dennis Sipiorski of Southeastern Louisiana University (the artist).
On offer for sixteen years now, the mid-May workshop focuses on both black-and-white photography and intimate observation of the coastline’s ebb. Herrick’s position as assistant director for the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area, as well as her skillfully wielded Nikon D7100—a digital outlier among the class’ film cameras—primed her for a daylong audit.
The professors and veterans of the workshop pointed out subtle changes in the marsh as they floated by. Last year we were here and the land extended to this area, they told Herrick. A sunken structure seen starboard: Well, five years ago that was only two feet in the water.
The $350 course welcomes the wider world beyond Louisiana college students with prerequisites calling only for “a basic photography background and a 35mm camera.” At the end of the week, LUMCON hosts a gallery showing of the students’ work. “This has been a labor of love [for LaFleur and Sipiorski],” said Herrick, who shared photographs from her daytrip on the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area’s social network. “They go back every single year, and they’re so interested in sharing this with students and people who want to know more about it.”
Visit lumcon.edu/education/university/summer/courses.asp for details on the coastal landscape photography course. More of Ashley Herrick’s photos can be found at facebook.com/AtchafalayaNationalHeritageArea.
Learn more about Relics: 2015 Photo Project here and submit your images to our yearlong cultural mosaic.