It had been raining for a few days in New Orleans earlier this month, but Frank Relle was not complaining. “I like it when it rains in the summer,” he said. “It cools you and you don’t have that heat building up into the night.”
These are not minor considerations, considering he does his best work at night. Known for his long-exposure nocturnal photos of post-Katrina New Orleans, he has since taken to Louisiana’s rivers and swamps, looking at how water and man coexist. He has thought a lot about how water both sustains the region and dealt it cataclysmic setbacks, first with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and then the BP oil spill in 2010. Both disasters got him to think, not just as a resident of New Orleans but also as a photographer whose way of looking at the world was irreversibly changed.
“In southeast Louisiana, there is this running contradiction of how we live with our resources,” Mr. Relle said. “The state economy is fueled by oil and the seafood industry. People’s livelihoods, ideas and politics get connected to things that are often in contrast to one another. Our attitudes and beliefs about what is good and bad for us, the nation or the planet are all tied up in a way of life that has to do with being able to live close to the water.”
His current project — “Until the Water” — is a nighttime tour of weathered homes set upon glistening waters, trees sprouting up from swamps, a refinery outlined by a constellation of lights or a concrete road shrouded in mist above the water. There is an air of mystery, even menace, at times. But to him, it is a reminder that to live along the water is to live with change.



The photographer, Frank Relle, as he prepared the lights for one of his shots. Frank Relle
“During Katrina, we had the destruction of homes, which are a symbol of permanence and family history,” Mr. Relle said. “When natural events, or even economic events, come and create massive change in our particular location, our sense of security is shattered and creates all sorts of questions about how we are supposed to deal with loss and impermanence.”
For people whose families have lived for generations on the bayou, change and adaptation have been crucial to survival.
“They have a better understanding of that impermanence, and they build their homes with that in mind,” he said. “Why would you build a floating home? Why not, if you’re building in the middle of a swamp? The urbanization of New Orleans has allowed us to forget our history and geography and that we are in the middle of a swamp.”
To get to the middle of the swamps, Mr. Relle took a roundabout route. The project started in the aftermath of the oil spill, when he was doing more traditional documentary work. While he encountered a “massive military-type response” to the spill, he did not find oil washing ashore, as he had been seeing repeatedly on the news. That, as events during Katrina did, made him wonder about how photographers cover events that start out with drama and disaster, but segue into a much longer period of recovery, often out of the spotlight.
“Photographers go to places to show extreme examples of things happening and create a reactive response to it,” he said. “Where is the room for nuanced, thoughtful work that stimulates a better discussion? Let’s consider this over time, as opposed to considering it now because this is the most extreme thing.”
That led Mr. Relle to a simple premise: to follow about a dozen roads through the state that lead to the Gulf of Mexico. Although that approach took him along the path of the water, it was not close enough for him. In 2013, he got his hands on a flat boat, which he rigged with lights, a generator and enough aluminum piping to build tripods — some as long as 30 feet — that he could then stick into the water to hold his camera steady.



Fort Beauregard. Lake Borgne near Bayou Yscloskey, La. July 2015. Frank Relle
Scouting out locations by day, he would take his rig back at night, illuminate the scene and begin his time exposures. Since the area was naturally dark, he could shut off his lights and scoot over to another part of the frame to light a different part of his composition.
“There is something about long-exposure night photography as a technique,” he said. “It’s a more complicated and layered technique that lets in elements. When we talk about the paradox of conflicts of place and these mixed ideas about how we relate to the environment, this kind of give and take, there is more nuance and mystery in that process than in middle-of-the-day shooting.”
The process allowed him to get close to places he had spied as a child but had never explored. It also allowed him to see how areas once reachable by land — like Fort Beauregard — are now accessible by water. The mood created by the night reinforced an essential truth.
“Along the bayou, the changing nature of place makes it have this temporary feeling because the water and weather make it so difficult to build structures and keep things neat and tidy,” he said. “Every couple of years, something happens and throws chaos into the mix.”
The questions he has raised in his continuing project could just as well be asked by residents of other areas, whether they were affected by rising water levels or devastating storm surges. Mr. Relle, keenly aware of these issues, still lives in New Orleans, in a neighborhood that made it through Katrina.
“I live on the third floor in a house that was built in the 1890s on high ground,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever move.”
Granted, he also has a boat now. Just in case.
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