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“In Pursuing a Personal Project, Global Dimensions Emerge”
– Kael Alford I recently presented a working version of my photography project about coastal Louisiana to a group of docents at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta along with a handful of photographs from Iraq. One woman asked: “Do you see any similarity between Iraq and the coast of Louisiana?” The question had occurred to me many times before—the most obvious similarity was the role that oil played in both, and it happens that Louisiana is among the states which have lost the most troops per capita to the war in Iraq.
Alford’s work from this project is featured on the Dart Center Web site »Occasionally I’m reminded of a scene in Iraq’s endangered marshes where the Euphrates empties into the Persian Gulf, the site of another great oil port at a boundary of the former Ottoman Empire. There, like in Louisiana, people still hand-carve canoe-style boats from wood and stand on the floor of the vessels, using poles to navigate the marsh.
Seven-year-old Juliette Burnet stands on a levee that will do little to protect her house in Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana from the storm surge of a hurricane
Walton Dardar, Jr.'s house was lifted from its foundation and transported by the floodwaters of Hurricane Ike. It ran aground on a levee several hundred feet from where it once stood and was torn down by Terrebonne Parish officials
Juliette Brunet walks the levee behind her house in Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana in the summer of 2007
A grave near Leeville, Louisiana slowly sinkes into subsiding land where seawater encroaches farther every year. Coastal Louisiana loses a piece of land the size of a football field every 30 minutes
A road in Terrebonne Parish on the coast of Louisiana floods regularly during storms and high tides, leaving local residents stranded. The road was badly damaged during hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008. Coastal flooding has increased drastically as marshlands erode at an alarming rate leaving communities in southern Louisiana vulnerable to storm surges like the one that flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
Jacob Walker, in the town of Isle de Jean Charles shows off a map of Louisiana tattooed on his arm that reads "Bottom of da Boot." In spite of the expense and trauma associated with increasingly powerful and frequent hurricanes, many residents refuse to abandon coastal areas that flood on a nearly annual basis
Thirteen-year-old Taleyah in her room. The house she's living in has flooded about every other year for the past decade and has been under repair since hurricanes Gustav and Ike struck the coast in late 2008
A view from the road South of Leeville, Louisiana in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana in 2007
A boy dressed as the captain of the Titanic participates in the annual Children's Tableau in Montegut, Louisiana in 2008
A mural painted on the wall of a pool hall in Golden Meadow, Louisiana depicts a shrimp boat on troubled waters. Shrimping, once a staple industry of life on the coast, is suffering at the hands of falling prices, foreign competition, and rising fuel costs