Virginia Hanusik

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water is omnipresent. With my work, I am interested in parsing the complexity of living with a changing climate while advocating for the value of a place that is often seen by the rest of the United States as a sacrificial climate buffer zone. The environmental parameters we are forced to reckon with today emphasize how living along the water will look increasingly different in the coming decades – especially as invisible infrastructures like flood insurance continue to alter the landscape. By focusing on the architecture, landscape and infrastructure of South Louisiana, my images illuminate how we’ve altered the land through shortsighted technical measures and have thus chosen to protect certain communities over others.

My pictures challenge the concept of “resilience” as it has been used to describe communities who are left to pick up the pieces from a system that has often failed to protect them. I’ve approached photographing these structures as a way to understand and analyze human nature: how ideas around ownership, community and identity are manifested across the built environment. The idea and practice of controlling water has been and continues to be a critical part of Louisiana’s modern history. Who has controlled it and what purpose it serves reflects greater ideas about the perceived value of property and of people. As stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels and the fossil fuel industry threaten the existence of the coast as we know it, how will our physical, mental and emotional connections to these landscapes be maintained? Can the architecture of these places promote ways of living and building that are more attuned to the nurturing of coastal ecosystems – both environmentally and culturally? At the core of the project is an effort to encourage thinking of this region—and coastal communities around the country—as an interconnected system rather than as separate and expendable landscapes. I intentionally seek out both direct and indirect evidence of these designed interventions to capture not just how we have normalized unnatural changes in habitat, but also to speculate on what that means for our shared future.

Virginia Hanusik (b. 1992) is an artist and writer whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture and the built environment. Her work has been exhibited internationally, featured in “The New Yorker,” “Aperture,” “National Geographic,” “British Journal of Photography,” “Places Journal,” “The Atlantic” and “Oxford American” among others; and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, Landmark Columbus Foundation and Mellon Foundation. Her book, “Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life and Land Loss in South Louisiana” (Columbia University Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the 2024 Paris Photo-Aperture First Photobook Award.