the waters that call me home

I’ve moved in and out of the New Orleans area multiple times in my adult life. Each time I go back, I wonder what draws me to this complicated, low-lying place surrounded by and sometimes inundated by so much water. Even the air is thick with water. Trying to find an intellectual answer left me blank. It was only when I looked back at my body of work over the last decade or so that I realized that I had been answering that question organically through photographs.

It is the marshes teeming with wildlife, the wild skies before a storm, and the waterways themselves. They are what drive me to run outside with the camera, lighting me up day after day when I live there. And they are what I can’t wait to see the minute I return. Those things call me home.

The last element – the ethereal pull of Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf, the rivers and bayous surrounding us — is expressed in this series. The images were created in camera, often using slow shutter speed and panning. In them, I see the flow and retreat, the love and exhaustion felt from being forever tied to New Orleans. And I see that, just like the bayous flow into the lake as it flows into the gulf, there is always connection.  

LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN, LOUISIANA

GULF COAST, FLORIDA