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Curated Conversation: Exploring Southland with photographers Kael Alford and Ben Depp
/// September 21 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
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Join photographers Kael Alford and Ben Depp as they discuss their photographic practice of documenting Louisiana’s disappearing coastline – the front line of America’s struggle with coastal land loss and climate change. The conversation will take place in the Museum’s historic Patrick F. Taylor Library and will be moderated by Ogden Museum’s Curator of Photography, Richard McCabe.
Louisiana is shrinking. The state loses an area of land the size of a football field every 30 minutes to coastal erosion due to both man-made intervention and natural disasters. Kael Alford’s Bottom of Da Boot: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast series documents South Louisiana communities most effected by land loss – Pointe-aux-Chenes and Isle de Jean Charles. Meanwhile, Ben Depp captures aerial images of the rapidly shifting landscape of Southern Louisiana while piloting a powered paraglider. Since 2014, Depp has been flying above the bayous and wetlands of southern Louisiana photographing evidence of the disappearing landscape.
Free to attend.
ABOUT KAEL ALFORD
Image courtesy of Billy Howard
Kael Alford is a photographer, writer, and educator. Her work explores legacies of political violence, relationships between humans and the ecosystems that sustain us and the our tenuous relationships to others. She develops photography-based projects that bring individual stories into dialogue with public discourse, backed by extensive research and long term commitment to her topics and subjects.
Alford photographed the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia from 1996-2002 and the impact of the U.S. led invasion Iraqi civilians from 2004-2011 and in 2017. She has been returning to photograph Native American communities in coastal Louisiana, building an estranged family album of her maternal grandmother’s lineage, since 2005.
Alford has published two photography books: “Bottom of da Boot: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast” (2012) and “Unembedded: Four Independent Journalists on the War in Iraq (2005). Her photographs have been widely exhibited in North America and Europe and are held in the permanent collections at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans) and in private collections. She lives in Denton, Texas.
ABOUT BEN DEPP
Ben Depp is an artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Much of Depp’s work has centered around the environment. In 2014, Depp began making aerial photographs by powered paraglider, which allows for hours of exploration, a low flight path and the time-intensive search for surprising compositions. Depp has been exploring and photographing South Louisiana’s coastal landscapes for ten years.
Depp’s work is in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Historic New Orleans Collection. His work has been shown at the Walter Anderson Museum, Louisiana State Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and more. Photographs from this project have been published by National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Audubon, Scientific American, and Photography Forum, among others. To see more of Depp’s photographs, visit Claire Elizabeth Gallery in New Orleans or Ann Connelly Fine Art in Baton Rouge.
ABOUT SOUTHLAND
Southland highlights the work of twenty-seven photographers, whose work spans over a hundred years of landscape photography. These photographers approach the Southern Landscape from multiple perspectives ranging from straight documentary to conceptually-based imagery. Some capture the beauty of the land and waters of the South with poetic images infused with allegorical signifiers found throughout the history of Southern landscape painting. Others address memories contained within the landscape, resonating from the region’s complicated and contested history. The Global climate-crisis is the main focus of several photographers, whose work blends elements of the documentary tradition with photo journalism.
Learn more about Southland/// Event image: Kael Alford, Indian Land with Oil Boom After BP Oil Spill, South of Pointe-aux-Chene, Louisiana (Detail), 2010, Archival pigment print, 20 x 20 Inches, Gift of Edwin Robinson, 2018.11.5
