“Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana” by Virginia Hanusik, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 184 pages
If there’s one film every Louisianan should watch at least once in their lifetime, it’s “Louisiana Story,” the 1948 docufiction directed by the pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty.
“Louisiana Story” follows the bayou adventures of a Cajun boy, the wonderfully named Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Le Tour, and his pet raccoon. The boy fishes from his pirogue, evades alligators and watches as a crew of roughnecks drill for oil behind his family’s home. But the film’s main star is Louisiana’s bayou country, which, shot in lush black-and-white, has never looked better.
“Louisiana Story” went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for best story and features the only film score to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. The kicker, however — left unrevealed in the film’s credits — is that Flaherty’s production was a crafty bit of petro-propaganda commissioned by Standard Oil to promote the company’s coastal drilling ventures.
It’s apt that Virginia Hanusik begins her debut book, “Into the Quiet and the Light,” with a brief reflection on Standard Oil’s film. Part-photography collection (with more than 50 of her own black-and-white images), part-essay collection (featuring 17 contributors), Hanusik’s own Louisiana story documents the state's coastal landscape, storm protection architecture and petrochemical infrastructure to consider issues of water, life and land loss in this ongoing era of climate catastrophe.
I’ve long been a fan of Hanusik’s Instagram feed, which frequently features sunset-hued light studies captured in coastal spaces most Louisianans dare not tread (or paddle). Though her photographs are mostly absent of people, they hardly feel devoid of life. Her images are often funny, most always wellsprings of emotion.
Online and in these pages, her photographs frequently play with perspective. The inherent monumentality of certain built environments is often placed far into the background, rendering the Chalmette Refinery, say, or a Lake Pontchartrain transmission tower, as tiny blips on a seemingly infinite horizon. Reminiscent of the grand, romantic landscape paintings made by the Hudson River School of artists in the mid-19th century, these photos simmer with sublime beauty, even when one realizes that the subject of the camera’s focus is as monstrous, as unappealing, for instance, as a levee wall.
Hanusik grew up in the Hudson River Valley and acknowledges that those iconic paintings shaped her understanding of how art inspired by the environment informs our relationship with the so-called natural world. “Landscape representation is not neutral,” she writes. Photography, like film, painting or any art form, is highly subjective, immensely personal, always political.
Other photos by Haunsik alternatively grab the viewer for a face-smacking close-up. A worn tarped roof in Cocodrie becomes an abstract assemblage of wooden slats, shredded plastic and nails glimmering in the sun. A colossal oil storage tank along the Mississippi River resembles the Superdome with its roof shorn away. The London Avenue Canal levee dwarfs a quartet of New Orleans homes, forcing the viewer into a game of floodwall peek-a-boo. Raised homes echo Escher drawings, impenetrable mazes of piers and stairs.
Hanusik uses these juxtapositions of perspective to powerful effect in one of the book’s highlights: a triptych of images of the Lake Borgne Storm Surge Barrier. Nicknamed the “Great Wall of Louisiana,” the 1.8-mile-long wall located at the intersection of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, built at a cost of $1.3 billion, ranks as the largest construction project in the history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Pictured telescopically distant and concealed by a scrim of reeds, the barrier is barely visible in the first photo. The next image brings the barrier closer into focus and glowing under the light of a full moon. The third portrait is all wall: concrete and steel, beautifully brutalist, gently violent.
The included essays illuminate and strengthen Hanusik’s photos. The words of their authors — a mix of activists, artists and several who bridge both realms — offer reports and warnings, personal meditations and dreams for a better future for the Gulf Coast and its residents. Plaquemines Parish ecotourism operator Richie Blink writes of utility companies — cable television and natural gas — pulling out of the area following Hurricane Katrina, “like a game of Monopoly in reverse;” he fears municipal water service will be next. Jessi Parfait, an archivist for her United Houma Nation, tells of the destruction of 1.6 million acres of virgin cypress forest over a half-century of logging. Musician Louis Michot offers an elegiac poem for “a land / That was cut / To make shortcuts.”
One of the few images to feature people is a photo of a photo. Above a pair of rusted-out and moldy mobile homes rises a billboard that shows two individuals planting native grasses, presumably, in a typical wetlands landscape. “Growing Louisiana Together,” the billboard reads, next to the logo for Shell Oil.
It’s a clever shout-out to that other “Louisiana Story,” and further confirmation that Hanusik’s Louisiana story is no less brilliant, no less worthy of the attention of every Louisianan.
The state has never looked better.
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Brown Pelican.”