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 waters themselves. They are what drive me to run outside with the camera, lighting me up day after day when I’m in southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. And they are what I can’t wait to see the minute I return. Those things call me home.

This series concentrates on the last element – the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf of Mexico, the rivers and bayous surrounding us and their ethereal pull. These images remind me that, just as the bayous flow into the lake that flows into the gulf, there is always connection. And I recognize a familiar flow and retreat. It is the love and exhaustion that I feel from being forever tied to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN, LOUISIANA

GULF COAST, FLORIDA