Industrial Balance, Grand Bois, Louisiana, 2004

Archival pigment print, first edition, 2 of 14, 12 x 18 in, NFS, Private collection

Boys play in floodwaters in Grand Bois (Big Woods), a community in the heart of the Houmas’ Yakne Chitto (Big Country), along an old highway connecting the communities of Bayou Terrebonne to Bayou Lafourche, and a “shortcut” to the United States’s largest deepwater oil port, Port Fourchon. Grand Bois sits less than 2,000 feet from an oilfield waste facility, permitted to treat “non-hazardous material” that has hazardous characteristics in open air pits and using injection wells, just north of some of the fastest disappearing land on the planet.