Of Cypress and Ice

Photographer Tina Freeman juxtaposes Louisiana’s coastal wetlands with the glaciers and icefields of the Arctic and Antarctic

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Bay Pomme d’Or. Little Bay Pomme d’Or. English Bay. Bayou Auguste. Bayou le Boon. Bay Jacquin. Cyprien Bay. English Bayou. Scofield Bay. On, and on, and on still continues the list printed in large, white letters near the entrance to photographer Tina Freeman’s Lamentations diptych exhibition that recently came down after a more-than-year-long showing at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The colloquialism “ain’t dere no more” gets thrown around fairly often in Louisiana, but the list on the wall alongside Freeman’s photographs—matter-of-factly labeled “South Louisiana Geographic Locations Removed From NOAA Charts #11358 and #11364, October 2011”—drives home what that phrase truly means for places, communities, and families along our state’s rapidly diminishing Gulf Coast. For countless people, what “ain’t dere no more” was home. For countless more, it’s the dreaded future for the places they now call home. In 2011, the same year that all those listed places were wiped from charts as they had been wiped into the sea, the U.S. Geological Survey’s analysis determined that Louisiana loses approximately a football field-sized amount of land every hour. It’s a warning we’ve heard so many times now that it sometimes feels as though it’s lost its gravity, but the practical reality of such a degree of land loss has lost no weight in its devastation on both environmental and human levels. The two are impossible to extricate from one another, after all. 

The extensive and complex interconnectedness—between humans and our environment; between humans and other species; between our environment and itself—is what Freeman presents in Lamentations. In an accompanying documentary short produced by NOMA, Freeman describes her childhood excursions to the mouth of the Mississippi River at South Pass to fish, and how at that time one could climb up the lighthouse and look out over dense, thick marsh. In 2013, she chartered a small, fixed-wing plane and flew over those same marshes from above. “Looking down from the plane, I did indeed encounter a fractured and sickly marsh compared to what I remember from half a century ago,” she says in the narration. On that flight she took aerial photographs—still finding the marshes beautiful, but also inspiring her to help educate others about the many tangible human forces destroying them. 

Two years earlier, in 2011, she visited Antarctica and was struck by the urgency of another problem generally foreign to Louisianans, but inextricably connected. “It was very much, ‘These Icebergs are going to end up in our backyard,’ in Antarctica,” she said to explain how the issue of melting icebergs was brought into her consciousness. She described seeing on the NASA website the massive cracks already forming in Pine Island Glacier, which—along with Thwaites Glacier—was being affected by warming waters. “So that glacier is kind of like a plug, the kind that’s on the water,” Freeman described. “So if that melts, it’s going to release a tremendous amount of ice.” 

"It was very much, 'These icebergs are going to end up in our backyard.'" 

—Tina Freeman

Such monumental quantities of melting ice across the world are directly correlated to rising sea levels and shrinking coastlines in Louisiana and far beyond. Reading the data and hearing it from scientists is one thing, but observing Freeman’s direct comparisons of such different yet interconnected landscapes juxtaposed in simultaneously beautiful and haunting images produces a visceral and immediate reaction. 

“It’s so overwhelming, to take on what needs to be taken on,” Freeman observed. “But in an interesting way, this period has really shown us some things. Like what happens when you cease a lot of airplane flights and cars moving around, how it really can clear up the environment.” Freeman’s passion for the planet goes far beyond taking photographs and doing research: she has moved into an apartment because of the dramatic reduction it makes to her carbon footprint, she drives an electric car (“although I still drive,” she says, as though with a tinge of guilt), she has switched to a plant-based diet because of the methane that cows produce. “And I did slow down the amount of flying I was doing for a while,” Freeman said, “But I have to say I didn’t stick with that too long, because most of the places I was going were for this project.” 

And in the process of photographing Lamentations, she covered thousands of miles, from locations closer to home in South Pass, Morgan City, Leeville, Grand Isle, and beyond; to as far afield as it gets in various remote areas of Iceland, Greenland, and Antarctica. Often the process of capturing the images she wanted was by turns adventurous and idyllic, like when on an air boat at a duck club south of New Orleans; other times, even GPS coordinates were little help in returning to a particular spot in the wetlands. Particularly in the Arctic and Antarctic, capturing the melting ice was much more trepidatious and complicated. “For me it was the beauty of the icebergs and the fact they were disappearing….it’s not going to be the same a couple of days down the line,” Freeman explained. “And I actually find that really exciting.”

[Read this: In a paraglider, Ben Depp adds his own perspective to the state's environmental crisis.]

In one memorable excursion, she and another photographer hired a pilot to fly them over Iceland in a small five-seat, single-engine plane. The other photographer took the front seat, relegating her to the back of the tiny craft while he suffered bouts of violent air sickness. “And there I was in the back of the plane, trying to get my shots,” Freeman laughed. The Icelandic Air pilot directed her to remove her seatbelt in order to lean her camera out of the small open window. “And it was somewhat terrifying, because I had all of my weight on this flimsy—I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a single-engine plane…you know how those are, the door is not as strong as this bench,” she illustrated, banging on the hollow-sounding metal bench we shared from a safe distance in the sunny sculpture garden outside of NOMA the day after New Orleans avoided the anticipated walloping from out-of-season Hurricane Delta. “And I had all my weight on the door, and we were doing these circles....But oh my God, it was so beautiful.” This story reminds me of my emotions taking in the Lamentations exhibition: the images are aesthetically beautiful and serene, but the severe practical implications of the shifting geography they depict are enough to make you sick to your stomach. 

Though Freeman spent most of her career as an interior and architectural photographer by vocation, she spent six years on a national conservation committee, producing a portfolio on the affects of toxins in air quality, and another on endangered species. She was taken aback when she reached out to the only source who possessed the necessary images to depict the research, and was denied use of the copyrighted material. “I was just so surprised that here is this information that’s really important, really needs to get out, and they’re holding it.” It seems Freeman has taken this to heart, and chosen to be much more open with her Lamentations series. Not only has it been shown at NOMA and LSU’s Museum of Art within the last year, but the diptychs are available in the form of a book, as well as for free perusal on her personal website. 

[Read another artistic perspective on climate change from November 2020's Visual Arts Issue here: Dawn DeDeaux creates post art for a post humanist world.]

Freeman hopes the series will educate those willing to learn, as it did for me and countless others who have viewed it and been moved to implement changes in their lives to benefit the world’s glaciers and marshes and everything in between. “It’s amazing what’s happened in a short period of time,” Freeman mused in regard to the previous day’s out-of-season hurricane, the rampant wildfires in the Western United States, and the other natural tragedies on 2020s substantial list. “And Australia was burning previously, and Siberia has been burning, Russia has been burning…But that’s something that I’ve been thinking about, is how anyone can continue to deny that this is happening,” Freeman balked. “The fact that they can continue to deny that it’s anthropogenic, to say that we’re not responsible—there’s a lot of denial in reality going on.”

To view more image sets from Lamentations, purchase a copy of the book, watch the NOMA documentary short, or keep up with where the exhibition will be next, visit tinafreeman.com.