Please join us at Claire Elizabeth Gallery, 131 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA 70130, for an artist reception and book signing with Ben Depp for his impressive new book, TIDE LINES: A Photographic Record of Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast, Saturday, March 18th from 3-6pm. We will be there with books available for purchase. The gallery is currently presenting a solo exhibition Depp's TIDE LINES photography.
Stunning aerial photos that reveal Louisiana’s vanishing landscape
In TIDE LINES, Ben Depp’s photographs capture the beauty, complexity, and rapid destruction of south Louisiana. Once formed by sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, the Louisiana coast is now quickly eroding. Two thousand square miles of wetlands have returned to open water over the past eighty years.
Depp’s photographs communicate weather and seasonal changes—like the shifting high-water line, color temperature, and softness of light. A careful observer will notice coastal flora and distinguish living cypress trees from those that have been killed by saltwater intrusion, or see the patterns made by wave energy on barrier island beaches and sediment carried through freshwater diversions from the Mississippi River.
With a powered paraglider, Depp flies between ten and ten thousand feet above the ground. He spends hours in the air, camera in hand, waiting for the brief moments when the first rays of sunlight mix with cool predawn light and illuminate forms in the grass, or when evening light sculpts fragments of marsh and geometric patterns of human enterprise—canals, oil platforms, pipelines, and roads. Featuring an introduction by Monique Verdin and over fifty color images, Tide Lines is an intense bird's-eye survey that depicts south Louisiana from an unfamiliar perspective, prompting the viewer to reconsider the value of this vanishing, otherworldly landscape.
Ben Depp is a photographer and National Geographic Society Explorer, who lives and works in New Orleans. Since 2014, Depp has created aerial photography flying over Louisiana’s coastline and wetlands in a powered paraglider. This mode of aerial transport allows him hours of exploration, a low flight path and the time-intensive search for surprising compositions. Depp’s imagery, a balance between environmental awareness and appreciation for the fragile beauty of nature, is intended to honor the vanishing landscape and document wetland loss and coastal erosion in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
Depp’s photographs have been exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana State Museum and the Southeastern Center for Photography. In 2017, he received a Communication Arts Annual Award in addition to grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, the Ford Foundation, and the National Geographic Society. Depp’s work has been published in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Sierra Club, Audubon Magazine, Cross Country Magazine and Louisiana Cultural Vistas. Depp is featured in the BBC film Earth's Great Rivers, PBS film River's of Life, and is the subject of the 2022 Bloomberg Green Film Docs Grand Prize winning documentary, “On A Wing & A Prayer”, video which aired on the Smithsonian Channel.
Event date:
Event address:
In Tide Lines: A Photographic Record of Louisiana's Disappearing Coast, Ben Depp's photographs capture the beauty, complexity, and rapid destruction of south Louisiana. Once formed by sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, the Louisiana coast is now quickly eroding. Two thousand square miles of wetlands have returned to open water over the past eighty years.
