Pic of the Day

PhotoNOLA, "an annual festival of photography in New Orleans" now in its fourteenth edition, is the occasion to binge on photographs at diverse venues during the month of December. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of images, I cannot remember why I selected this photograph for my daily Instagram post. More I look at Go Back, Go Back 217 from Bradley Dever Treadaway, more I find it mundane and riveting.
The banal shot depicts a mother waist-deep in water, enjoying an afternoon at the pool with her two pre-teen sons. The trio soaking in the sun, looking up at the camera and smiling, represents the picture-perfect scene of a blissful Sunday in suburbia. The photograph is divided by a diagonal line caused by a sharp drop of the pool floor and on the left side, a greenish dark color replaces the background's cobalt blue surrounding the young family. Deep at the bottom of the pool a coiled hose is lurking.
The snake-like object creates tension and the picture becomes a story: Could the children fall into the pool's abyss? Could the inert shape become alive and strike them? Could a fun afternoon end up in tragedy?
Like a collage, the superposition of a childhood's photograph on a recent shot of the same pool blends past and present, contrasting a carefree joyful time with today's neglect, decay and emptiness. Where are the protagonists? What happened? Like a bad omen, a black frame surrounds the composition.
Go Back, Go Back is a vast project described by the artist on his Website as "exploring spatial, historical and technological ambiguity that concerns the recollection, reconstruction and failure of memory, manifesting as memento mori and the closing chapter of 50 years of family history."
The joyful moment next to the scene of abandonment hints at before and after, loss and death.

Bradly Dever Treadaway "Go Back, Go Back 217", 2019

Worth a Thousand Words

Lately, climate change is on the news almost daily it seems, heightening our awareness of the phenomenon and its consequences on the planet and ultimately our lives. Tina Freeman's interest in glaciers was triggered by Brett Weston's photographs of Alaska in the seventies and brought her to visit the remote state in 1989. For the past seven years, she has spent time on a project which culminates with the exhibition Lamentations on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art. From the Wetlands of Louisiana where she was born and raised to the Arctic and Antarctica, she explores nature's changes  through twenty-seven photographic diptychs accompanied by charts and data.

An introductory wall text provides the key to the exhibition and next to it, two nautical charts from Southern Louisiana (1934, 2019) placed side by side illustrate the loss of land, so does a list of locations removed from the charts (2011). The diptychs are hung on the walls of the gallery's four rooms with date and location of the shots, leaving the visitor wander at leisure from one scene to another. Each is made of the juxtaposition of a southern and a polar landscape. The seamless transition between the two images makes it appear as if they had been shot at once. Taken at different time and place, they always have some kind of connection: subject (cemeteries, glacial lagoon and freshwater marsh, whaling station and oil tanks), shape (sea ice breaking and wetland, floating iceberg and cypress tree) or color (orange sunset and oil booms). The photographer "sees" beyond the landscapes and her technical mastery allows her to play with scales and perspectives to reveal compositions invisible to the untrained eye. Among more than fifty images, the closest hints of human or animal presence are cemeteries and the skeleton of a musk ox, as Freeman concentrates on the quiet world of nature. The end of the exhibition features a list of retreating glaciers (2138!) and a single aerial photograph of the Mississippi River flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The connections between distant lands affected by the same phenomenon, i.e. climate change, are documented by the artist through photographs of places we will most likely never visit. Acting as a witness on our behalf, she explores a threatened natural world and reveals its accelerating changes. The stark data accompanying the poetic, dramatic, beautiful, sometimes dreary images make comments superfluous and the long list of places already gone written in white on a black background is fit for a funerary monument.
Lamentations, a biblical term, expresses the grief felt upon the realization that the changes witnessed are most likely irreversible, impacting the future of our planet.

pic#1:
Left: 20140222_Dritvik_016
Ice along a stream, western Iceland
Right: 20130911_Louisiana_Deltas_270
Healthy marsh along the lower Mississippi River, just West of South Pass

pic#2:
Left: 20111203_Deception_Island_037-3
Deception Island, Antarctica
Right: 20060531KatrinaEastbank217
Cemetery near Violet, Louisiana, in the Katrina aftermath

pic#3:
Left: 20130819_Iceland_058
Glacial outflow, southeastern Iceland
Right: 20130911_Louisiana_Deltas_566
Sediment near Wax Lake, Louisiana