As we play god

The way landscape photography aestheticized historically often excludes conflict, contested histories, and social-ecological concerns. In my photographic work, I try to expose photography’s broader potential, as it can create links between the viewer and urgent social issues that connect to the collective body and the experience of climate change. As we play god is a visual investigation into infrastructure failure and environmental collapse in the fastest-disappearing land on earth: Southeastern Louisiana. In this photographic and field research project, I look at the poetry of material systems’ failures by finding the human errors that collide with weather events to produce economically and spiritually costly catastrophes such as levee breaches and flooding. River deltas are dynamic, building, or eroding based on the rate of sediment deposit. However, since the original colonization of the homelands of the Choctaw and Chitimacha people, the “taming” interventions of the river system by the Army Corps of Engineers for short-sighted economic gain have increased dramatically; human infrastructure has choked these wild, living waterways, causing die-offs of entire ecosystems. My photographs attempt to unveil the absurdity of a white supremacist culture’s continued reliance on outdated technologies and ways of thinking—sandbags, small-scale physical models, myopic, protection of private interest —to provide a remedy for current environmental collapse.