ART
Holding On
Sampson draws attention to the vanishing marshes and swamps “outside the levee system” in her ongoing black-and-white photography series “All the Place You’ve Got,” a line she borrowed from O’Connor’s 1952 novel “Wise Blood.” Here the gospel-haunted protagonist Hazel Motes tells readers, “In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” To Sampson, Louisiana’s wetlands are all “we’ve got” and they are disappearing. To better understand the plight facing people who live and work in the wetlands, Sampson attends their church services and visits with the subsistence fishing families and others to hear their stories. “We only have one home,” Sampson says. “Louisiana already claims some of the world’s first climate refugees out of Isle de Jean Charles. Learning about and participating in efforts to preserve our wetlands benefits all of us — industries which invest in and extract from those environments, fishermen who support themselves and their families from the bounty of our waterways, to the burgeoning ecotourism industry around New Orleans, and the creative community that draws inspiration from this special, vulnerable place.” Sampson is referring to the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish inhabited by the Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-ChitimachaChoctaw Indians. Like the Jean Charles Band and other wetlands residents, Sampson is sensitive to the land. The 31-yearold New Orleans resident was born in Virginia but raised in Central Louisiana’s Rapides Parish. For generations, the Colvin family on her mother’s side farmed the land in North Louisiana near Dubach in Lincoln Parish — that is, until natural gas and oil were discovered on the family property in the 1930s. Gradually, gas wells and pine trees replaced crops and cattle. “Just about everywhere you look,” she says, “you can identify the presence of the petrochemical industry — from its physical occupation of and contribution to our damaged wetlands, to its effects on the accessibility of our natural landscape, to its ubiquitous influence in our society in terms of what this industry supports, what it minimizes and who it marginalizes. I feel like my family’s connection to the natural resources of our home state is at odds with the environmental sustainability for which my photographs advocate, but conversely it reminds me how deeply tied folks’ livelihoods are to the natural resources of this place, how much pride people have in their work. It’s a complicated issue and I think drawing a hard line isn’t a realistic way to win people’s hearts to the plight of coastal restoration. It’s going to take stakeholders from the oil and gas industry as much as folks from conservation (above) Barataria Bay, backgrounds.” 2016 (facing page, top) Sampson, a 2012 LSU graduate and photogQueen Bess Island, Preraphy archivist at the Historic New Orleans Restoration, near Grand Collection, first became interested in Louisiana’s Isle, Jefferson Parish, wetlands back in 2013 after reading about coastal 2019 (left) Bonnet Carre erosion, wetlands dredging, saltwater intrusion, Spillway, 2019 land subsidence and the political and social
New Orleans photographer Cate Colvin Sampson captures Louisiana’s vanishing marshes and swamps BY JOHN R. KEMP
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ouisiana photographer Cate Colvin Sampson, inspired by the writings of Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, joins a growing chorus of artists and photographers raising warnings about South Louisiana’s endangered wetlands and a way of life for the people who have lived there for centuries.
10 LOUISIANA LIFE MAY/JUNE 2020
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