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Having worked as a photographer for several years, I have spent many sleepless nights with Photoshop open, “perfecting” images for fashion editorials and advertisements. A slightly higher shoulder, maybe a different color for the background, perhaps hair that is a bit longer. By nature, photographs lie. They capture only an instant, a sliver of time. It is up to the photographer to create a coherent story through these little lies, creating a larger truth when viewed together. Photoshop and other image editing software enables the photographer (or anyone) to turn a white lie into a dark thunderstorm of a lie, or more innocuously, to simply make parts of an image more visible.

After traveling over one thousand miles from Florida’s Panhandle to Grand Isle, Louisiana and back to document the devastation wrought by the deadly sea of crude oil, I feel confident when I say that BP is not handling the disaster as well as their multi-million dollar TV commercials and newspaper ads would like us to believe. I encountered a cleanup effort that seemed to focus its greatest attention on easily accessible beaches frequented by tourists, leaving more secluded areas awash with death and oil. Boom languished uselessly near the shore as waves swept over and under and around it, allowing the crude to drift freely onto the beaches, bringing with it a ghoulish horde of dead fish and other marine wildlife. A long hike along the beach in Grand Isle took me to a deserted stretch of shore covered with dark brown pools of oil. The carcasses of birds, fish, and dolphins littered the sand and rocks – left under the fiery Louisiana sun to rot and quickly disappear at the hands claws of hungry crabs with more appetite than sense.

On July 19, 2010, John Aravosis reported on a “fake” photo of the Crisis Command Center found on BP’s very own website. The photo wasn’t even one that required hours of careful examination to spot what had been changed in Photoshop; it was blatantly and ridiculously obvious. The Washington Post picked up on the story and reported the following: “Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.”

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This entry is the sixth of a several-part installment on my coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Feel free to comment and ask questions. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105

I made my way back through the overgrown field to my car and headed south toward Venice. One might expect to see people lining the streets, protesting and lamenting the slow death of the Gulf in their own backyard, but the streets were silent and the people even more so. In this part of Louisiana, there are two types of people; those whose jobs are oil related and those whose jobs are fishing related. Much of the industry in Venice is related to service and transport for the offshore oil platforms, and it’s easy to understand why few from the oil industry are breaking formation to bite the hand that feeds. Harder to understand are the fishermen, now jobless, but still largely silent. It becomes easier to understand once you realize that they too now rely on BP for a paycheck.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Lighthouse Lodge and Villas, whose website proclaims, “Venice…It’s Where You CATCH Fish!” Two large US Coast Guard Mobile Incident Command Center trailers were parked on the north side of the hotel and two trailers belonging to the US Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Emergency Response Team were parked to the east. I continued south, passing by another trailer parked at the intersection of 23 and Jump Basin Road, this one emblazoned with the catchy logo, “Jails on Demand.” A tall pile of plastic bags sat to the right of the trailer, filled with oil-absorbent boom.

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This entry is the fifth of a several-part installment on my coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Feel free to comment and ask questions. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105

After spending a sleepless night in Biloxi, Mississippi I pulled myself back to the realm of the living and returned to the road at 5am as the stars were beginning to fade into the sunrise. I followed Highway 90 west along Mississippi’s coast, crossing over the new Saint Louis Bay Bridge, reopened in 2007 after being left looking like a collapsed line of dominoes by Hurricane Katrina. On the western side of the bridge, the coast turns south and Highway 90 continues inland, turning into 607 and eventually intersecting with I-10. Continuing west and then southwest on 10, I passed by Slidell, my car bouncing up and down on the infamously bumpy stretch of highway that tests the shocks of any vehicle and then over Lake Pontchartrain on the new Twin Span Bridge, recently constructed to replace the old span that was also left in ruins by Katrina. I was pleased to see that New Orleans looked more and more like its grand old self, having still appeared in bad shape the last time I passed through the city a few years earlier. Grass no longer grew from the roads, signs no longer were covered with rust, skyscrapers were no longer windowless, and while I still passed by neighborhoods filled with abandoned, flood damaged homes, things were definitely looking up.

Tragically, just over 50 miles to the south of the city the beaches, marshes, and bays were being inundated by a vast sea of crude oil. I faced a quick decision; whether to head first to Venice, a relatively isolated town 80 miles to the southeast, or to Grand Isle, 110 miles due south. Separated by only about 30 miles of water, the two towns are geographically neighbors, but require a four hour drive to travel from one to the other. I made my choice to head to the closer Venice, departing New Orleans around 10:30am. I drove south on Highway 23, which skirts the western bank of the mighty Mississippi river.

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This entry is the third of a several-part installment on my coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Feel free to comment and ask questions. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105

By this point into my journey west through the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, my skin had called it quits on its old color (oatmeal) and had started its own rapid journey towards a crispy shade of burnt umber. The sun in Gulf Shores was beating down oppressively, thunderclouds hanging ominously near the horizon yet keeping their distance and allowing a merciless heat to wrap its heavy arms around everything that moved. The humidity was as high as it could get and sweat poured from my flesh like the rain that stubbornly refused to fall. My bottles of water were no longer cold nor even cool, even in the trunk of my car they had become unbearably hot, the water rendered as useful for quenching thirst as a handful of sand.

Having heard reports of other members of the press being hassled by law enforcement and BP security, my usual paranoia was magnified to full alert. Photographers are easy targets and our memory cards even easier, so I was anxious to get the images from my cards to the relative safety of my laptop, slowly roasting in the trunk along with my water. After filling my memory cards with photographs, I returned to the otiose shade of the car to upload the images. Once on the laptop, I backed the images up onto an external hard drive….one can never be to safe. With the tragic photographs of the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama doubly saved, I decided to continue my travels west.

The gulf coast is not the ideal place to travel by vehicle; it is dotted with dozens of bays, peninsulas, lagoons, and barrier islands that make traveling in a straight line west impossible. My next destination was Dauphin Island, Alabama. In retrospect, I should have taken the Fort Morgan Ferry across Mobile Bay directly to the island. My brain, scrambled by 95 degree temperatures and the constant inhalation of the sickly sweet scent of light sweet crude, opted to take the nearly two hour long drive around Mobile Bay instead. I can’t complain too much about the long drive; this is one of the most beautiful regions of America and in any other situation I could easily spend weeks exploring the old Southern towns. A light rain began to fall as I drove north, then west, and then south, taking a horseshoe shaped path around Mobile Bay.

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This entry is the second of a several-part installment on my coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Feel free to comment and ask questions. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105

Lagoon Pass has been blocked off to prevent oil in the gulf from entering Little Lagoon. Gulf Shores, Alabama. This panorama is made up of 42 high resolution images, stitched together to allow a 180+ degree field of view. The light brown coloration on the rocks in the lower right of the image is crude oil left behind by a high tide. The Gulf of Mexico is to the right and Little Lagoon is to the left.

The previous entry left us in Gulf Shores, Alabama and I think it’s important that we linger there for a bit longer before journeying farther west. I’ve spoken to countless people as I have been on the road and so many of them have been echoing the same sentiment that the media isn’t giving them the big picture. Some have been quick to run up the conspiracy flag, yet I’m more cautious about flinging accusations. I have definitely seen some excellent reporting and fantastic coverage of this disaster, but unfortunately so many articles are written and newscasts given without any firsthand knowledge or experience. This epidemic of press-release journalism results in incomprehensible numbers being tossed into the airwaves without any real understanding of the significance by those doing the reporting. 1,000 barrels, 5,000 barrels, 200,000 gallons, 1,000,000 gallons… The numbers are constantly changing, and understandably so, as the real scale of this tragedy becomes apparent. Without seeing the oil stained shores firsthand though, it is difficult to report on the true nature of the spill and impossible to correlate vague numbers with real world damage in a way that makes sense to the reader/listener/viewer.

Large pools of thick crude oil and contaminated seaweed coat the sand on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The rental properties bordering the beach were largely empty, many renters choosing to vacation elsewhere for the summer.

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