LA OIL

I’ve been going down to Venice Louisiana for several years now, as a photographer sometimes, but as a fisherman always. I’ve fished offshore for the pelagics like tuna and marlin, and I’ve also fished inshore in the marshes for coastal species like trout and redfish. It’s an understatement to say the fishing is exceptional there. We've caught so many fish and so many different species, I always come back with amazing fishing stories that are so brash they almost sound like “fishing stories”. It really transcends any fishery I’ve ever fished, and I’ve fished a lot. I was down there last week on an oil story, and I can show these on my blog. It was kinda hard to find affected areas as the delta marshes are gigantic, unless you had a boat and some time to get to the barrier islands. We had good friend and fishing guide Ryan Lambert of Cajun Fishing Adventures take us out. The Mississippi river delta is a massive place, it was about 45 minutes by boat through the marshes to the last strip of barrier islands before the open gulf. As we got close to an island on the backside, we started to see the oil slick in the bay, not thick black oil, just a sheen on the water, too subtle to photograph, but you could smell it. We pulled up on the back of the island, got out, and walked out onto the beach on the front of the island. Pretty instantly we started seeing big gooey tar balls on the beach and also coating everything from old beer cans to marsh vegetation. I decided to really concentrate on these objects eerily coated in oil. I didn’t style, pickup, or move anything, just walked along and shot pictures of the oil. The strange thing was the eerie absence of wildlife, dead or alive. We saw a couple of seagulls on the beach with a little bit of oil on them, but mostly the beach was empty of birds. Technically speaking, I dragged along a lighting kit with me, and lit the pictures to give them a bit of eerie style. Ultimately, I wanted the images to be beautiful, and repulsive at the same time, give you a reason to look at them in a very direct and different way. Its strange to photograph a tragedy like this in a place that you are intimately connected to. The truly ultimate irony is when fishing offshore there, the oil rigs were always the fishing destination and that’s where we would setup. The fish all congregate underneath and around the rigs, as the small bait fish use it for protection. I had fished on several rigs in the gulf, and today wonder if one of them had been the Deepwater Horizon…