Documenting Disaster: Tides and Time
Editor's Column from LCV Fall 2010

Art in its richest form is a form of individual expression that also embodies collective memory. When a cataclysmic event threatens or engulfs a community, it simultaneously creates both an occasion to document its effects—on landscape, structures, people, and culture—and also engenders a newly heightened appreciation and even (or especially) nostalgia for what was before and is now threatened, destroyed, or more tenuous than ever.

Following the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, in its very first issue following the storm—printed in October 2005—began to collect and present the images and impressions of the devastation. In subsequent issues over the next five years, we continued to publish the evolving visual record of the storm, both documentary and expressive, as painters and photographers brought their intense focus to bear on what was the new present, along with visions that memory and imagination conjured in response to the event and its aftermath.

New Canvas
And so we begin with the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the complex relationship that human society, industry, and culture has had with the Gulf Coast, its naturality and its bounty as a source of livelihood both through the maritime industries—fishing, crabbing, oystering, shrimping—and the exploitation of its underlying mineral wealth, in particular: oil. In the first of two essays of this issue, “Visions of the Gulf” and the accompanying photographic essay “Oil+Water,” we begin to document the most recent challenge to our way of life and the landscape we love and upon which we depend.

Among the perspectives we provide at this moment in the unfolding event are historical memory, realist and impressionist depictions, idealization, and prophecy. In “Visions of the Gulf”, we present historical images of the Gulf in its natural and recreational form and during the advent of human harvesting of its bounty with the work of such notable artists as Ellsworth Woodward and John Genin. Over time, artists such as John McCrady, and more recently David Bates and John Alexander, began to capture the oil industry’s imprint on the landscape, while other contemporary artists such as Elemore Morgan, Jr., and Simon Gunning continue to see the inherent beauty in the coast and bayous. Perhaps most disturbing among these renderings prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion is Jacqueline Bishop’s prescient and prophetic work Trespass, created in 2003-04 and highlighted on our cover, a foretelling of the inevitable consequence of man’s exploitation of nature.

New Lens
Similarly, in “Oil+Water,” with Fonville Winans providing an historical counterpoint and Philip Gould and Mark Sindler a more contemporary view of the oil and maritime industries, we begin to present documentation by some of our most extraordinary contemporary photographers of the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill. The first phase of this documentation is to log what was. Then, as was the case with photographers following Katrina, the first focus is on immediacy. Quickly on the scene and capturing remarkable and iconic images are David Rae Morris, Cheryl Gerber, and Debbie Fleming Caffrey. Though documentary, the compositional elements of the work of these extraordinary photographers makes them transcendent of the moment as well. More constrained by their medium than the painters, nonetheless, we can envision their work continuing to evolve as does the aftermath itself and we begin to know in reality what, for the moment, we only fear.

Even as we prepare these features for publication, the Deepwater Horizon well has been capped, but debate still rages about how much oil looms in invisible plumes below the surface and what the long-term effects will be on the drilling industry, the maritime industries, and the landscape and cultures of the coast itself. Boom and berms are still being deployed, with what result, none can yet say, or depict. Just as we are about to put this issue to press, another fire has broken out on another well due west of Deepwater, but more inshore, and rumors of a new sheen already are circulating.

As with Katrina, over time Louisiana Cultural Vistas will continue to serve as a forum for how the cultural community continues to see and envision events of such monumental impact on our lives.

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief