NO MORE NOTHIN LEFT
Ten years ago, I began photographing Louisiana landscapes using black and white instant film. It was an experimental project for me; the instant film was unpredictable, unstable, uncontrollable. As quickly as the image appeared on the film, it would start to fade, slowly disappearing, blurred and discolored, back into the emulsion. Although initially frustrating, I recognized a parallel between polaroids and the subject matter. The instability of the film was showing me something greater than the initial image. It was reflecting the physical landscape, Louisiana’s delicate coastal areas, places that are also slowly disappearing.
We hear it all the time here: “Louisiana is losing a football field of land every hour to coastal erosion.” It becomes repeated so often that it almost feels like lore, or an abstract contradiction challenging a larger myth that landscape can be preserved, unchanged except for geological processes that occur across deep time, seemingly unobservable in our lifespan. What happens then, when these processes are expedited? How do you see the change of something occurring on that scale? Or better yet, how does it go unseen?
These are not before and after images of the same place, but a comparison of what has happened to the same image across the span of ten years. The diptychs serve as a reflection of seemingly abstract environmental processes across time. The slow deterioration of an image. The dynamic evolution of a landscape. Things of perceived permanence changing, disappearing, constantly evolving. These images serve as a metaphor for a greater issue. They act as a visual reminder for the very processes that occur every minute of every day, altering the world around us in ways that we cannot see until we look back over time, recognizing the change, seeing for ourselves what it means.
In 2014, select Polaroids from this body of work were exhibited at the Self Processing: Instant Photography installation at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
The title for this body of works derives from Mike Tidwell’s 2007 book entitled Bayou Farewell.