Southern Louisiana, once formed by sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, is now rapidly eroding. Over the past eighty years, Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of wetlands, accounting for ninety percent of the coastal marsh loss in the US. Louisiana’s eroding wetlands provide a natural barrier from hurricanes and storm surges that protect seventy percent of the state’s population. They also support the largest commercial fishing grounds in the lower 48 US states and provide crucial habitat for many endangered and threatened species of birds and animals.

This exhibition is part of Ben Depp’s ongoing project documenting the rapidly shifting landscape of southern Louisiana. Depp has been flying above the bayous and wetlands of southern Louisiana in a powered paraglider for ten years, photographing the incredible beauty and the visual clues that tell the story of this place and its destruction.

With a powered paraglider, Depp can fly 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 pre dawn light and illuminate forms in the grass, or when evening light sculpts fragments of marsh and the geometric patterns of human enterprise—canals, oil platforms, pipelines, and roads.

In Depp’s photographs, one can make out varieties of plants, see the weather and seasonal changes—from the shifting high-water line, color temperature and softness of light, to what is in bloom—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.

This intimate view of Louisiana, from a bird’s-eye perspective, prompts Depp – and he hopes, others – to see and appreciate this landscape in new ways.