Bottom of da Boot: Louisiana’s disappearing coast
“The photographs in this collection comprise an estranged family album...What I found in Louisiana was a complex American history that had been largely unrecorded, in a distant part the country that felt foreign and oddly familiar.”
“Great-uncle John drove me a few miles south…[we] turned west across an impossibly low, crumbling asphalt road flanked by water on both side. John pointed over the lake in disbelief, toward my great-grandfather’s camp. The coast had been rapidly eroding since his childhood. There was nothing but water there.” —Kael Alford
House on eroding land, Leeville, Louisiana.
Bottom of da Boot (Fall Line Press, 2012) focuses on the people and places of the disappearing communities of Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes on Louisiana's fragile coastline. Photographs taken between 2005 and 2011 document the lives of the people living in their eroding environment, as they honor the legacy of their Native American and French lineage.
An essay by Brett Abbott, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, introduces this book of photographs which were commissioned by the High Museum's Picturing the South series. An award-winning international photojournalist, Alford contributes a poignant essay about her personal experience discovering her own family heritage that is connected to these people and this place.
Fall Line Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9799379-1-0
78 Color Photographs
128 Pages
Hardcover
10" x 9.75"