Tegan Wendland from WRKF and I drove down to Isle de Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish yesterday. Martin Environmental Solutions, America’s Wetland Trust and the United Houma Nation were all pitching in to try to save some of the rapidly disappearing coastline of south Louisiana.
The cheniers that run in rough parallel to the bayous of the greater-Mississippi Delta system each seem to lead to a new a unique culture and coastal way of life. It’s just fascinating. Depending on where you turn off from Louisiana Highway 1 you can end up in Grand Isle, amongst the descendants of Jean Laffite’s pirates (and a lot of well-appointed fishing camps) or right in the heart of the Houma Indian nation.
I have heard stories about Pointe Aux Chenes and the Native Americans who are still holding on to the fringes of coast that the storms have left behind— another fold in Louisiana’s limitlessly nuanced fabric. While most of the shots were for WRKF (and possibly NPR) and the Indian Country Today Media Network, I did have time to shoot a few “atmospheric” shots of the area.
The color shot of the boat launch at Pointe Aux Chenes WMA is a 30-second ND exposure. There was a fair amount of wave action but I guess it wasn’t enough to give that nice, misty look to the shot. So, I rendered it down to the sort of picture that I am almost always going for— one that looks like it was taken with a consumer camera 40 years ago, casually processed and left in a shoebox for the past four decades. The other is a shot of some abandoned and slowly decomposing shrimp boats along what I think was Bayou Pointe-Aux-Chenes, but I am not totally positive. I was a pretty day for a drive.