Louisiana Drowning
In a paraglider, Ben Depp adds his own perspective to the state's environmental crisis
The sun sinks her rounded edge into the water and orange rays arc upward for one last hurrah: gilded and gleaming, the light scrapes just over a half-sunken boat, ringed by the feathery tips of swaying swamp grass. Dangling thousands of feet above, photographer Ben Depp looks down on the Earth and captures a moment in which her art and humankind’s meld together.
Many of the pieces in Depp’s Louisiana Drowning collection, a series of aerial photos of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, feature such striking interplays between the makings of man and the wildness of nature. But it’s not all sunsets: human errors and arrogance loom over the haunting images, which gut the viewer with a reminder of the region’s delicate mortality.
Over the past century, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, representing forty percent of the United States’ continental wetlands, have begun to disappear, breaking off and sinking into the Gulf. According to the United State Geological Survey, Louisiana is currently losing as much as 75 kilometers of wetlands annually. This coastal erosion is partly a result of the Earth’s natural cycles of decomposition and changes in ecosystem. The effects of these natural forces, however, are reinforced by the traces of humanity. Our canals, our draining and filling and grazing and digging, our levees built up to protect us from the fearsome Gulf, our entire Industrial Revolution inducing climate change–we play a part as well. It is estimated that, at the present rate of wetland loss, in two hundred years the lands of moss-draped cypress, of waving marsh grasses, of fat fish and lounging otters and sleeping gators, will be lost entirely.
When Depp first moved to New Orleans in 2013, he was already concerned with environmental devastation. In this transition he left behind five years of documentary-style photography in Haiti, a place stripped bare by earthquakes, cyclones and hurricanes, where the world had broken under her people’s feet, leaving a devastatingly visible destruction. “I think my experience living there really impressed on me the impact of environmental degradation, how much suffering it causes,” said Depp. “It was so revealing how quickly—when you break those ecological systems—how quickly that comes back to the impact on communities.”
Almost immediately upon moving to Louisiana, he looked for his own way to broadcast the consequences of coastal erosion. “A lot of photographers were already doing a really good job documenting the impact it was having on small communities on the coast, telling that story of human impact.” A few notable projects Depp mentions include Tyrone Turner’s Bayouland, Michael Smith’s Bottom of da Boot, and William Widmer’s work on coastal flooding.
Sitting on commercial flights in and out of New Orleans, Depp saw a space for himself in the storytelling. “I would look out of the window, down on the swamps and bayous,” he said. “It’s so strange and surreal and beautiful.”
It is estimated that, at the present rate of wetland loss, in two hundred years the lands of moss-draped cypress, of waving marsh grasses, of fat fish and lounging otters and sleeping gators, will be lost entirely.
After exploring options like hitching rides on private airplanes or getting a drone, Depp ended up taking a five-day course in Pensacola on powered paragliding. With his new wings (or rather, a Fresh Breeze motor strapped to his back with an Ozone wing to catch the wind) he was able explore for hours, suspended beneath the inflated paraglider thousands of feet above the Gulf region with a Canon 5DS R 50-megapixel digital camera and a 35mm lens. “It’s a pretty intense experience, to be flying kind of all alone over swamps and bayous,” he said. “It’s incredible to see one thousand feet out as the sun is rising over the clouds.”
Over the course of the last three years, in his free time, Depp has set out to photograph the wetlands from this high vantage point, often camping for days at a time in the middle of the marshlands along the coast. This experience, the escape into the swamp, is one of the reasons he says he can’t stop working on this still-in-progress project. “South Louisiana heat and bugs … it’s still kind of like work,” he said. “But it’s awesome. I love being out there.”
Depp says that many of his photos were only possible because of his ability to wander aimlessly and to spend a lot of time exploring. “Like, I would have never planned to go out and take a picture of just grass,” he said. “But you spend enough time out there and you find grass that emits these incredible wave patterns, and you learn exactly when the perfect lighting will be.”
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Asked about the story he hopes to convey through his photos, Depp went quiet for a moment. Then he sighed, shrugging as he said, “So when I got into this, I was interested in making images that were more straightforward storytelling. To show what had been done to the coast. What was happening to the coast. But after just being out there and spending so much time in this area, I found myself just… seeking beautiful pictures.”
A photo taken near Montegut, Louisiana, shows algae blooms folding and swirling in countless shades of vibrant greens and blues, resembling a geode, something semi-precious. It’s as if, while Depp was searching for his story about the world, the world shared a bit of her own story with Depp. That interaction between man and earth, at times so devastating and destructive, can also produce something so mesmerizing, so powerful.
“I think that, if people look at these pictures and just have a little bit more fondness or appreciation for South Louisiana, that’s enough,” said Depp. “I believe that more people need to fall in love with this landscape of South Louisiana before they’re going to do what is necessary to protect their state.”
To fall in love. Because, from the very beginning, in all our careless destruction and under-appreciation and exploitation of the land we tread upon, in all of the earthquakes and famine and tornadoes that bring us to our knees, the saga of Man and Earth has always been exactly that: a love story.