Building on the environmental and perceptual inquiries of Slow Light, this project expands into an immersive scale. Gaslight River traces the toxic imprint of the petrochemical industry along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—a region marked by ongoing environmental racism and often referred to as “Cancer Alley” or “Death Alley.”

In the fall of 2020, I undertook a river expedition with a small crew in a wooden voyager-style canoe to photograph Death Alley at night. We paddled all day, made camp at dusk, and returned to the river after dark to make photographic afterimages from the water. This expedition marked the beginning of an ongoing effort to capture the total visible light emitted by this petrochemical corridor, rendered as a continuous scroll of afterimages as seen from the river itself.

A 200-foot, site-specific iteration of Gaslight River was installed along the St. Claude Avenue neutral ground in New Orleans, a thoroughfare linking the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards. On view from late 2021 through early 2022 as a satellite project for Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, the installation served as a visual interruption in a highly trafficked public space. It embedded petrochemical afterimages into a site of daily movement to confront the violence of corporate environmental ruin.