Cajun Mardi Gras in Southwest Louisiana, 2014.
A parade attendee climbed a light pole on St. Claude Avenue during the Nine Times Second Line parade
Will Widmer: I studied sociology and anthropology in undergrad, but decided I couldn't imagine myself just reading and writing all my life. I have a strong interest in people and places, and photography became a gateway to understanding that wasn't rooted in reading books. For me, photography is the ultimate excuse to go places I wouldn't otherwise go and speak with people I wouldn't otherwise speak with. Susan Meiselas said—and I'm paraphrasing—that photography can either be a degree of separation or connection, depending on how it's most needed. I love that push-pull.How long have you been living in New Orleans?
I moved here in 2010, shortly after the BP oil spill, and five years after Katrina. Everything this summer has been about the ten-year anniversary of Katrina in one way or another, and I've been roaming these areas that are close to main levee breach sites, taking a broad look at what these neighborhoods look like ten years out. Katrina defines this place, for better or for worse.Does being a photographer allow you to engage with/understand a place? Is that your intention?
My primary interest in this region is human ecology and peoples' relationships to the natural environment. That was one of the main components of me moving down here, actually: to work on issues in what I deem to be the frontlines of climate change for the United States. There's this huge, huge shift occurring along the Gulf Coast right now, we're losing land at a crazy catastrophic rate that nobody outside of Louisiana seems to know or care about. A lot of what I work on down here is showing these vulnerable coastal communities and their way of life, and the way things feel here now, because I feel that's what's at stake here. That's what I want to communicate.
Of course I do, yes. It might be cliché, but it's part of what I want: I want to make succinct and powerful statements with an image that pulls people in, and makes them care. When my work is at its best, I feel like I'm advocating for this place and helping to articulate why it matters. We're in the Deep South and some of the country's most marginalized people live here, in vulnerable coastal eco-systems, and they don't really have a voice. When I do my best work I feel like it's able to speak toward this universal human experience, though it's very deeply rooted in this place.I love your diptychs, and how the pairings give each individual image more strength. My favorite is the guy on the lamp paired with Jesus on the cross. Did you take the photo of the guy in the lamp because you thought it looked like a crucifix?
No, I wish I could say that!No, no, I think it's better that it came afterward.
I like diptychs because they abstract the narrative, and allow the images to play off one another. They're a bit more open-ended, and maybe a bit more universal. I really like negative space in the photo of the guy on the lamppost, and that picture is one of the first I made in New Orleans that I was really excited about. It's from a second line parade, which are these roving parades or parties that are accompanied by brass bands, and people just go nuts, climbing on rooftops and dancing in the streets.
There's a vulnerability to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Delta, and capturing that environmental change is what motivates me as a social photographer. Once I went to art school I started to care more about form and the visual aspects of photography, but yeah, my pictures are always socially motivated. It's a balance, and my most successful images have a bit of both.Following up on what you were talking about with religion: faith is clearly a strong force in your work, and where you live. What do you think has the strongest power in the Bayou: nature, or God?
I think that they're very, very closely related for a lot of people that live down here, whether that's in Mississippi, which has some of the deepest pockets of poverty and disenfranchisement that I've ever seen in this country, or whether that's in coastal Louisiana. There's a photograph I took on a shrimp boat out there, of a Catholic mass held on the boat before they went out shrimping. The priests and deacons are at the front of the lead boat, all decorated with flags and forming a procession on the water, and they're sprinkling all the shrimp trawlers as they go down the Bayou to wish everyone a safe and bountiful shrimping season. So when you talk about land, and you talk about God or faith, for a lot of people here, they're synonymous.
Normally when I'm making pictures I'm very much in the moment, and consumed by the immediate narrative of each picture. And then it's sort of reimagining it afterward, and like you said, giving it more strength by putting it with other pictures that might allow it to speak more broadly than it did on its own, giving each one more life outside of its initial context.What do you think will happen with the environment in the South?
Sea-level rise is not helping here, but the real issue that we're up against is land loss and coastal erosion that's due largely to oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, and the environmental engineering that's gone into the Mississippi river. So we have a particular problem here in that it's largely man-made. The Eastern Seaboard and Miami are more concerned with sea levels, but it's mostly human engineering that's fucked us over down here, and that's fascinating because there are tangible causes. Like, there are barges going back and forth through the wetlands 24 hours a day and creating these wakes that knock down the fragile grasses, and you can show that as a photographer. It's hard to show what factors contribute to problems like melting ice caps, but here it's possible. And laying out the problem means that we might be able to create solutions on a statewide or national level.
Annual Catholic Shrimp Boat Blessing Ceremony in Southern Louisiana, 2011.
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4th Anniversary of BP Oil Spill in Southern Louisiana, 2014.
Top & Bottom:
DJ Poppa's Birthday Party, New Orleans, 2010.
Second Line Jazz Parade Season in New Orleans, 2010
Top: New Orleanians paraded in homage to 'Uncle' Lionel Batiste, a longstanding member of the Treme Brass Band and a symbol of the city who passed away on July, 8, 2012. Bottom: Quintn, Derrick, and Quincy La Fleur live in a small community near Riceland Crawfish, Inc. that struggles with blight and poverty.
Left: New Orleans, LA - Parade attendees make their way down Elysian Fields Avenue during the Nine Times second line paade. Right:
New Orleans, LA - Theris Valdery prepared his Mardi Gras Indian suit for the evening performances.
Lafitte, LA – Sunrise over Cochiara Marina in the middle of what many Southern Louisianans called the worst white shrimp season in their collective memory.
Houma, LA - Mike Voisin, President of Motivatit Seafoods, Inc. points toward a map that illustrates the projected loss of land in coastal Louisiana by 2050.Right: Lafitte, LA – Obituaries for friends and family cover the walls next to a 'Fisherman's Prayer' at Nunez Seafoods, Inc.
New Orleans, LA - 2/21/2014 - The city of New Orleans has come a long way since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina subsided. But in parts of the city like New Orleans East—a stretch of subdivisions developed in the 1960s and 1970s but accounting for around two-fifths of the city's geographic area—the slow pace of recovery has sparked outspoken frustration.
