It’s a pleasure for us to host the remarkable photographic work of Dartmouth senior lecturer in studio arts and world-renowned photographer Virginia Beahan at the Libraries. Over the summer, Virginia collaborated with our new Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer, Max Seidman to curate “Disappearing: An archive of land loss in coastal Louisiana.” Virginia writes in her artist's statement that the selected exhibition images document “profound changes adversely affect[ing] the lives and economies of the people who live there [spawning] dozens of mitigation efforts involving sediment diversion, reforestation, and other coastal resilience programs.”
Virginia's six large-scale black and white photographs offer a profound and striking visual treatise on Louisiana’s changing coastlines, “intended to function as a kind of personal mapmaking, visual representations of a place in time.” On the one hand, the photos are memorials: snapshots mapping the landscape as it was. Conversely, they honor what can be in how they spotlight what needs protecting for future generations.
View the exhibit in Reiss Hall, Baker Library.
Want to explore this topic more deeply? The following reading list, compiled by Virginia, expands on this exhibit and offers an in-depth look into human connection to the land and what it means to intervene when the land changes.
