i just wanted to draw attention to a friend of the blog's most recent photography project. i've written a lot about louisiana & new orleans & what those places mean to me. i've even written about florida. mr white has done an exemplary job of capturing some of the qualities of these places that exert such a strong pull on some of us: the isolation & the resilience, the beauty & the decay, the singular & the universal. seeing the before & after pics of pilottown reminds me of the pensacola news journal pictures of the p'beach fishing pier during hurricane ivan & the after shot of a single piling rising up from the calm gulf waters. those pictures made clear to me what the city of pensacola had been through because of the storm. mr white's pictures work the same way for another devastated region.
his south florida pictures are damn fine too.
"Photography for this project began in the spring of 2000, made on both black and white film and digital color, continuing to the present day. In this collection, I have photographed nearly every named location in lower Plaquemines Parish and have what I believe is a very thorough collection of images of this place. One such location is Pilottown, the historic home of the Bar Pilots, which was shot on black and white film in January, 2005. After it was almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, I returned there in April of 2008 to find this one-of- a-kind town, the last manned outpost on the Mississippi River, barely hanging on; a few pilot houses were being rebuilt, while the remainder of former homes along the river completely vanished."
- Matthew D. White-
February 21, 2009
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