Has the ‘Southern Man’ folded his hand too early?

Photography of change isn’t some poetic device to underpin the Madison Avenue hucksterism of sell, sell, sell. For photographer Matthew White, who has been plying his trade in the South and throughout the Gulf of Mexico for way over a decade, he sees the viewfinder as a crystallizing force in our modern and post-modern lives. He’s got great shots of life, culture, and the conflated pressures of urbanization and ruralization on the ecosystems. Clouds mix with seascapes, and the hard edge of tropical light sinks into the multiple layers of marsh grasses, but also for White, he wants that patina and corrosion of the landscape etched in by human enterprise to be the contrast between the landscape of industrialized man and alligator wallows and sea bird roosts he discovers as part of the photographer’s journey. He’s been in the muck – bayous, wetlands, swamps, deltas and barrier islands – ready to observe and capture how light traps the motion that defines the Gulf’s habitats and people. His work is emblematic of a time gone by: no high-gloss flashy images, but rather the passage of time and gravity and weather as they swirl in the fixer bath of his artist’s brain. White’s work is about a sort of galvanizing lamentation through imagery – staking out locations and place as he returns over time to visually express what it means to be in the Gulf, under the beauty of struggling nature and the ever-expanding reach of industry and man’s toxic habit of killing beauty in order to get at hydrocarbons, wood, gold and animal flesh. He shared his perspective with Down to Earth readers earlier this year, as part of the Dispatches from a Disaster special coverage of the Gulf. (See the story at here. Now, six months after the spill, he shares the current situation in the South and further reflections on the country’s largest natural disaster. Q. What major lesson have you learned from this Deepwater blowout after six months? A. I learned just how huge the influence of oil companies has over state and national politics; they’re almost their own body of government. I was pretty amazed at how tightly controlled the public perception of this event was. Q. What’s the state of your state and the Gulf six months after the blowout? A. Louisiana is hurting. Tourism is down; the fishing industry is barely hanging on, and, still, people continue to worship the oil patch and blame troubles on Obama. The Republican establishment here was very successful in deflecting blame off the oil industry and onto President Obama. Q. What most worries you about the next six months to six years? A. That the coast is never really going to be very safe for swimming, fishing, recreation. The event was so tightly controlled they could be telling us anything. I think we’ll be seeing random slicks pop up for some time to come. Q. Why isn’t the Southern man-woman burning effigies of the leaders of companies directly responsible for the Gulf spill, like those associated with BP and Halliburton? A.: Because Southern people are taught to have more respect for Halliburton than the president; that the almighty CEO provides their job, and they all believe if they just work hard enough, they too can be a millionaire CEO some day. There was a very concerted effort on the part of the Jindal (Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor) administration and BP to shift blame away from them and onto President Obama, and the oil field workers here blamed Obama and stood up for oil companies because those companies provided their jobs and Obama took them away with the moratorium - that’s the pre-scripted narrative they were fed. Jindal and the Louisiana GOP were very careful to never mention that Obama had BP set up a system to compensate workers who lost their jobs as a result of the moratorium. If you told someone that here, they’d deny it and continue to blame Obama. Conservatives here tend to worship the rich and think that fining them or asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes is punishing success and rewarding laziness. Q. As a photographer, what do you see as key to understanding the visual impact of the oil’s harm? A.: Seeing it from the air, in all those aerial shoots I did this past summer, was the eye opener for me: you could see miles and miles of oil on the coast at Grand Isle. I could look out into the Gulf from 2,500 feet over Port Eads and see hundreds of oil and gas rigs sitting out there in the water; it was amazing to see just how big an impact the oil industry has on the Louisiana coast. I think anyone who took an aerial tour of the area would easily see how huge that impact is, how much land loss has been caused by dredging pipeline canals, how the coastline has been affected by all that oil washing ashore, among other oil industry practices. Q. Will you be happy with any follow-up or investigation to see why this happened and how to stop it? A.: I think heads should roll and reparations be paid. I think Howard Zinn asked once, and I’m paraphrasing, that when oil companies gouge prices and pollute the planet, they are allowed to negotiate their own punishment and the amount of their fines. When was the last time a bank robber was allowed to negotiate how much of the stolen money they’d pay back? Q. Why isn’t mainstream media still investigating this along with the moratorium on drilling being lifted, etc? A.: I think they have packed up and left to avoid conservative pundits of accusing them of being the kook-fringe liberal tree-hugging media. There’s also no quick dramatic photo ops anymore; the obvious stuff has been well-covered up, so the fast-food news stations don’t see a way to make a fast buck anymore.