The Sunday (July 6) Museumgoer story in the New Orleans Advocate | The Times-Picayune visits the New Orleans Museum of Art to explore the photography exhibit “Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed,” which features images that offer an exploration of water, color, and environmental storytelling – all centered on and below the surface of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
Floc’h produced this work during a 2022 residency in America. The exhibit combines monochromatic photographs of river water made under the surface with black-and-white landscape images made along the length of the photographer’s 13,000-mile journey from north to south. The result offers a visual meditation on how rivers connect the people who live on or near them while at the same time documenting the environmental impact those people exact on the rivers.
Sediment, organic matter and pollutants – diffused through surface sunlight – create underwater photos of many vibrant, translucent colors. About 300 of these images are arranged in this exhibit as “a polychromatic map” (image above) of the Mississippi from Empire to the Gulf.
In a separate exhibition space, the dramatic landscape photographs are presented side-by-side with the color photos, breaking the surface to show life on the Mississippi watershed from Minnesota to Louisiana and beyond.
Read the story here. Listen to a podcast interview with Brian Piper, NOMA’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings, here. Images from the exhibit are below.
Thanks to Brian, and to you for reading and maybe listening.
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