Taigan Fetch Magazine by Taigan

Since the April Deepwater Horizon explosion, the entire Gulf Coast has been in serious peril. It has also long been a subject of photographer Richard Sexton, whose 2007 book Terra Incognita lovingly documents the tangled swampland and once-pristine beaches between Georgia and Louisiana.

The photos featured above are of bits of beach ephemera discovered in the wake of visits by storm or man of both. They are especially haunting now, as workers in hazmat suits patrol beaches laying booms and collecting tar balls—rather than gull feathers and nests.

Sexton began documenting the region’s extraordinary natural beauty 15 years ago, photographing powdery white dunes and clear Gulf waters, seemingly primeval lowland forests, and the gifts of nature like the ones featured above. “I realized the landscape of the Gulf Coast is in a peculiar way unknown—terra incognita—but not because it hasn’t been explored, mapped, or inhabited,” he writes Terra Incognita’s preface. “It’s that this landscape has eluded our national psyche. The pursuit of manifest destiny…came to focus national attention on uniting the Atlantic seaboard and the Pacific Coast, while the Gulf Coast (the archetypal middle child) languished.” The area is certainly languishing now after an event so catastrophic that Sexton’s book is now both a valuable artifact and a call to arms.

The photographs collected in the book were also the basis of a show curated by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. That same exhibition is currently on view at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi until September 1. It’s a fitting venue—like Anderson, Sexton is both an artist and a naturalist. ”The connection between Walter Anderson’s Gulf Coast and mine is that the region has been steadily changing from a world where nature prevailed to one where human presence and alteration of the natural landscape is increasingly prevalent,” Sexton says. “It’s a troubling evolution, but I don’t know that Anderson’s art, or mine, is capable of altering society’s behavior and making us better stewards of the land—or that either of us created our art to achieve that outcome. Regardless of what society does, we would have made the art anyway because it’s what artists feel compelled to do.”

The rest of us are grateful. And we urge our readers to take a look at the brilliance and (now) poignance that is Terra Incognita, available at Richter Gallery on TAIGAN.com. Samantha Richter, who called New Orleans home for several years, also has individual images from the series available for sale, as well as Sexton’s more recent color work from the Gulf Coast.

Shop Richter Gallery on TAIGAN.com

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