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Tide Lines
Tide Lines
A Photographic Record of Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast
In Tide Lines: A Photographic Record of Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast, Ben Depp’s photographs capture the beauty, complexity, and rapid destruction of south Louisiana. Once formed by sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, the Louisiana coast is now quickly eroding. Two thousand square miles of wetlands have returned to open water over the past eighty years.
Depp’s photographs communicate weather and seasonal changes—like the shifting high-water line, color temperature, and softness of light. A careful observer will notice coastal flora and distinguish living cypress trees from those that have been killed by saltwater intrusion, or see the patterns made by wave energy on barrier island beaches and sediment carried through freshwater diversions from the Mississippi River.
With a powered paraglider, Depp flies between ten and ten thousand feet above the ground. He spends hours in the air, camera in hand, waiting for the brief moments when the first rays of sunlight mix with cool predawn light and illuminate forms in the grass, or when evening light sculpts fragments of marsh and geometric patterns of human enterprise—canals, oil platforms, pipelines, and roads. Featuring an introduction by Monique Verdin and over fifty color images, Tide Lines is an intense bird’s-eye survey that depicts south Louisiana from an unfamiliar perspective, prompting the viewer to reconsider the value of this vanishing, otherworldly landscape.
Mostly, though, these photos are works of art. Each one is freestanding. Sometimes you can’t tell if it’s taken from 10 feet or 1,000. To learn more, you must turn to the caption pages in the back of the book, and a map that shows where they were taken. The photos often seem abstract, impressionistic — designed to make us ponder and marvel.
Ben Depp’s Tide Lines matters tremendously—the loss of coastal Louisiana will impact every part of the US, altering the American economy and its culture. These striking photos provide a new perspective that brings this home in ways I haven’t seen before. They make you think.
Ben Depp’s exquisite photographs of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands could be used to illustrate the book of Genesis. They describe a primeval landscape that resounds of Creation. On closer inspection, we see evidence of man’s careless intrusion, one that does not bode well for this delicate and vital region. Depp’s photographs should serve as a warning, a call to action, while there is still time.
Depp’s aerial photographs of Louisiana’s wetlands and coastline are poignant examples of the catastrophic effects of climate change and serve as evidence that the American South is on the front lines of an international human-made crisis.
Successful photographs, like Depp’s, bear witness not only to what lies inside the frame, but to a larger context of experience and history that envelops the decisive moment. Depp’s work—informed by geologic time, southern art and cultural history, and present societal and ecological circumstance—invites the viewer to leave behind a vantage point of myopic modernity for one shared with the birds.
Ben Depp is an artist and National Geographic Explorer whose work centers on the environment. Using a powered paraglider and a nineteen-foot wooden sailboat to access remote parts of Louisiana, Depp documents coastal erosion from a new perspective.
