Perspectives: Virginia Hanusik
On changing the visual narrative of climate change, advocacy for her adopted home state, and the role of human engineering in environmental and social justice today
“Climate change is the defining issue of our times,” New Orleans-based photographer Virginia Hanusik told me matter-of-factly. “It is projected that by 2100, most of South Louisiana will be underwater,” she said, referring to the alarming findings of a 2009 study by LSU scientists Mike Blum and Harry Roberts. It’s a message those of us who live here have heard before. Despite the warnings, by birth or by circumstance, we remain.
Within her work documenting Louisiana’s coast and the people who have called it home for generations, Hanusik carves out a space for this particular sort of dissonance—the undeniable grandeur of a place, superimposed over its inevitable ephemerality.
Hanusik describes the scope of her work as interstecing landscape, culture, and the built environment. Under her direct, reverent gaze, everyday scenes of life on the coast take on a quiet, poignant beauty. Whether it be a fog-shrouded Fort Proctor against the St. Bernard sunrise, the Old River Control Structure in Concordia Parish, or a lone boat anchored amid a placid Lake Pontchartrain, Hanusik’s subject matter is gently evocative of the mystic splendor associated with the Mississippi River—which in one image, from her vantage point at the Port Eads Lighthouse in Plaquemines Parish, spills out into the Gulf as receding marshland yields to pulsing tides.
“These scenes have been synonymous with the climate crisis,” Hanusik said. “But the reality is that every community is currently living with the impacts of climate change at this very moment.”
As a visual artist and researcher, Hanusik employs a more surreal, fine art style in her photography, which imbues her images with subtlety and sensitivity as she works to understand the nuanced relationship between the environment and its people through projects such as A Receding Coast: The Architecture and Infrastructure of South Louisiana. Embedded within Hanusik’s projects is a visual contrast; a softness and radical empathy that blunts the coexisting razor-sharp reality of rising seas and a warming world. “Aesthetically, I'm interested in being able to kind of capture that special light and color that exists here and evoke this sense of wonder that I don't know gets captured as much as it should,” she said.
Hanusik’s vibrant architectural portraits show manipulated agricultural landscapes, from communities of homes built upon stilts in Grand Isle, Venice, and Isle de Jean Charles to a New Orleans batture settlement nestled between the river and the city’s levee system (read more about the Southport Colony on page 34). Hanusik seeks to depict the broader narrative of climate change through a localized perspective, capturing a specific moment in time as the environment around us rapidly changes. Unlike the majority of disaster imagery in the media—which tends to be tinged with spectacle, depicting aerial images of raging wildfires, the melting Arctic, or in Louisiana’s case, destruction wrought by hurricanes, flooding, and rapid land loss—Hanusik’s oeuvre is a balm that acknowledges both the value of this place and its inevitable future. “These scenes have been synonymous with the climate crisis,” Hanusik said. “But the reality is that every community is currently living with the impacts of climate change at this very moment.”
Over the past eight years, Hanusik has trekked to far-flung rural and coastal communities across South Louisiana with her camera in tow, and the resulting visual dispatches render the landscape’s fragile natural beauty in such an authentic, knowing way that it comes as a genuine surprise to learn that Hanusik isn’t originally from here. A native of upstate New York, Hanusik grew up in the Hudson River Valley—the birthplace of American landscape painting—surrounded by picturesque landscapes, rolling hills, and fall foliage. After graduating from Bard College, she made the cross-country move to New Orleans in 2014 to work in coastal reclamation and water management for a non-profit that supports entrepreneurial approaches to social issues.
The reason why it’s so important to pay attention to Louisiana right now, Hanusik argued, is because what is happening here—coastal retreat, climate migration, rising sea levels—will affect everyone eventually. We just happen to be experiencing these issues at a rapid rate due to the unique geography and economy of South Louisiana.
“Floods can no longer be considered a natural occurrence—they are often the result of policies that protect certain communities over others. Infrastructure is not neutral; it is a physical marker of tension that results in both loss and gain.” —Virginia Hanusik
This landscape is both a result of the Mississippi River’s shifting course over the centuries, she said, as well as a feat of human engineering. As a 2020-2021 photography fellow with Exhibit Columbus, Hanusik explored the history of flooding and politics of disasters within the Lower Mississippi River watershed over the past century. The series—which interrogates architectural adaptation and how the built environment symbolizes what we value—provides vital historical and cultural context into how we got here, incorporating archival images, maps, and interviews with residents alongside Hanusik’s contemporary photographs. In the wake of natural disasters like the 1927 Mississippi River flood and Hurricane Katrina, she questions why certain communities suffer in the face of predictable environmental catastrophes, and how those communities are portrayed in mainstream media. “Although the region is intricately connected by a shared resource, there is a division between who has benefitted and who has been harmed by over a century of human engineering to manipulate the river’s water flow,” Hanusik writes in the artist’s statement for her most recent project, On the Origins of High Water. “Floods can no longer be considered a natural occurrence—they are often the result of policies that protect certain communities over others. Infrastructure is not neutral; it is a physical marker of tension that results in both loss and gain.”
[Read Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's profile on biologist and artist Brandon Ballangée's work here.]
Building a better future is possible and within reach, Hanusik argued, but it has to be done with the people of the communities who have been impacted. She continued this work in 2022 as a Rising: Climate in Crisis Resident at Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods, where she worked on The Place We Keep, a forthcoming series exploring the inequality of disaster relief and preservation in five communities along the Gulf Coast experiencing the impacts of climate change; the collection features a compilation of photographs, oral histories, and public programming on the perpetuation of environmental injustice in the region.
“There is a conflict that’s almost tangible when you analyze the landscape here,” Hanusik said. “As someone who makes art about climate change, I’ve noticed that people tend to think the two categories are, ‘We are doomed’ or ‘We have hope,’ but the truth is you can mourn the loss of a place and fight for its future at the same time.”
Virginia Hanusik is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally, featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Domus, Places Journal, The Atlantic, MAS Context, and The Oxford American among others, and supported by the Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, Landmark Columbus Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. She is on the board of directors for The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, where she is currently organizing a panel for fall 2022 in relation to the body of work created during her residency at A Studio in the Woods. See more of her work at virginiahanusik.com.