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