Michel Varisco

Last week's news about BP's eventual stoppage of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico may be the first good news in the 90-odd days of the disaster, but it's only one piece in the much bigger and longer process of remediation. The news also threatens to overshadow the scale of the disaster; even with the bombardment of images and news around the spill, it's far too easy to forget as the next important event displaces what came before. Photographs from the series "Shifting Lands" by Michel Varisco do a good job of conveying the scope of the spill in the Gulf, since many of them are taken from above.


["Shifting Lands" by Michel Varisco | image source | spill photos are found at the end of the series]

Her images--in the above series and others focused on the area--straddle the realms of nature, documentary, and art photography. The beauty of Gulf-coast Louisiana certainly comes through in the images, but so does the interaction of humans and nature, a less-than-symbiotic situation that seems to be coming to a head just as we are told things are under control.