Taigan Fetch Magazine by Taigan

As the weather turns colder, thoughts inevitably turn to sand and water. Nowhere are both more beautiful than on America’s “Third Coast,” especially when captured in stunning images by photographer Richard Sexton.

Sexton grew up in rural Georgia near the Alabama and Florida borders. Like countless other Southerners, he spent his childhood vacationing along the Florida panhandle—that stretch along the Gulf Coast still affectionately known referred to as the Redneck Riviera, due to it’s powdery white sand and clear blue-green waters.

After a ten-year hiatus in San Francisco, where he worked as a commercial photographer specializing in architecture, Sexton returned South. He settled in New Orleans, intent on documenting the historic architecture of the city and surrounding areas. The results—moving photographs of both lost worlds and very alive shrines—can be found in his books New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence and Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road.

Upon his return, Sexton also bought a house in Seaside, Florida, the influential New Urbanism community smack in the middle of the stomping grounds of his youth. In his book, Parallel Utopias, he focused on the architecture of Seaside and a similar community in California. A book on Rosemary Beach, another architecturally significant development on Highway Thirty-A near Seaside, followed.

But Sexton’s attention was as captured by the extraordinary natural beauty of the landscape as by the exciting architecture going up around him. For fifteen years he traveled the region between Georgia and Louisiana, documenting the pristine beaches and tangled swampland, the seemingly primeval lowland forests, the affecting pieces of ephemera discovered in the wake of visits by storm or man or both. “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 in the preface of Terra Incognita, the book in which the photos are collected. “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.”

Of course, the Gulf Coast got plenty of attention after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of it in 2005, but Sexton turns a far more loving eye toward his subject, beautifully showcasing both the fragility and the immortality of the nation’s “middle child.” The good news is that since Katrina, Sexton has stayed hard at it, working these days in color as well as black-and-white.

Sexton’s work is in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Historic New Orleans Collection. His photographs may also be purchased at Nashville’s Richter Galley on TAIGAN.

Above, from left: DESCENSION, Grayton Beach State Park, Florida 2003, from TERRA INCOGNITA; SEASCAPE ONE, Grayton Beach State Park, Florida 2007

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