Coastal Louisiana doesn’t have many beaches. It’s mostly marsh, cat tails and reeds populated primarily by herons, spoonbills, coots, and other water birds. It’s a flat, almost featureless, world when you drive through it sitting high up in an RV.
There are no houses on the ground. There’s very little ground and almost all of it will be inundated with water several times a year at a minimum. Maybe that’s why everything out here is called a “camp”, it’s a way of acknowledging the temporary, precarious nature of the structures.
Nearly every house has a sign out front with a name. Camp Canal, Camp Dr. Herbert, Camp David, Camp Southern Leisure, Camp 12 Oaks, and my personal favorite, Camp Plan B. I even saw a single wide mobile home on 12 foot high stilts with a sign on it that read: Cajun High-Rise.
We spent five days camping on the only beach around, Rutherford Beach. It’s free and you can pull right up on the sand. It stormed a good bit and fog would roll in pretty much every night, hiding the lights both onshore and off, making it feel like we were all alone in the world.
That’s what I like about this photo and why I went black and white with it, it feels more stark, more isolating, more raw, which is exactly how the Louisiana coast felt to me. And unlike the last image, I felt like the grain worked in this one. I shot it while driving, so it had a bit more softness to it that lent itself to adding grain. It looks more like film with that little bit of softness.
