Bayou Corne

In 2012, Texas Brine, a massive mining company operating throughout Texas and South Louisiana hit a salt dome that triggered the earth to be swallowed up. The Bayou Corne sinkhole in Assumption Parish, Louisiana, became a symbol of industrial greed at the expense of the natural environment. The adjacent community was forced to evacuate, most unable to return. While the media paid attention to the site immediately after, there’s been no continued documentation of what the physical landscape looks like and what it means in the larger context of climate change and social justice.

South Louisiana is America’s major energy corridor; the impact of pollution and environmental degradation on communities is based primarily on one’s race and class. How we define home and simultaneously reconcile with the increasing fragility of the built environment and instability of the natural world?

These photographs, taken between 2018 and 2019, are part of an ongoing project that explores the relationship between extraction, identity, memory, and its manifestation in the land.