OPINION . Editor's Letter

Engulfed


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Published: Jun 1, 2010

I know this week's cover photo essay by Michael M. Koehler is not a local story. But the unfolding ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is important.

When Koehler, a longtime contributing photographer for City Paper, told us he was heading back down to the Gulf, we were intrigued. He'd met a group of shrimpers while volunteering in January 2009, and last summer began documenting their already struggling industry and waning way of life. Now these fishermen are being employed in the hard-to-see-as-anything-but-futile efforts to clean up after the gushing oil leak that threatens to put a nail in their livelihoods, as well as their rich culture, once and for all.

There's a lot of ink and blame being spilled in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, as Jeffrey C. Billman breaks down. But underserved are the stories of the people who stand to suffer more immediately from what is only the latest in a series of catastrophes on Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

Koehler arrived on May 23 and shot through May 28.

"There was chaos down there, like an underlying tension of people needing to do work, to do anything," he recalls. "So they did the work on the BP payroll. But if they took a second to think about what was really going on, there was this feeling of sadness and anger."

He was shooting in an environment that was not particularly welcoming of photographic coverage. "The press was not allowed in any of the work sites," he says. "I had heard stories of deck hands who had brought cameras out while they worked, that the Coast Guard was taking cameras and deleting photos."

Koehler — who can't help but get worked up after having spent time in what's turning into a pressure cooker — described to me an encounter after getting off the helicopter from which he took his photos of the barrier islands. A filmmaker was shooting footage of seventh-generation shrimper Ricky Robin in tears after seeing for the first time the magnitude of the disaster. "A BP official saw and asked them if they were filming. He said 'yes,' and [the official] went outside and got a wildlife agent and also a sheriff to confront him."

For Koehler, this trip was a mission of mercy. He'd raised some money at an exhibition of his photos of the shrimpers, and was traveling to Louisiana "to deliver the check and to check on my people. If the thing that seemed most necessary was loading boom, I'd have done that. But when I got down there, I felt like the most important thing was giving these people a voice, because everything is so censored.

"We cannot let this be another thing we forget about," says Koehler, drawing an analogy to the chemical that's being sprayed on the oil. "It can't be like the dispersant. We need to keep our eyes on this."

(bhoward@citypaper.net)