Kael Alford

Bottom of Da Boot

Kael Alford cut her teeth as combat photojournalist covering the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s and the American invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. Her coverage stood out for its unusually intimate portrayal of the profound impacts of war on the daily lives of ordinary people caught in the fray. In 2005, a Dutch magazine sent Alford to Louisiana to photograph the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina. While there, she visited the coastal marshlands where her maternal grandmother had been born and is still home to the Native American communities from which she descends. She had just begun to make inroads on the project when the High commissioned her in 2007 to pursue it further.

Alford spent the next four years concentrating on Iles de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chênes, two native enclaves in Terrebonne Parish that face a rapidly encroaching ocean due to coastal erosion caused by oil drilling and efforts to control the flow of the Mississippi River upstream. Drawn to these Francophone communities by their deep connection to the land and her own lineage, she evocatively recorded the landscape and its marginalized inhabitants who tenaciously persevere in their way of life on ancestral ground despite the unceasing precarity. After years of photographing in situations marked by drama and action, Alford had to train herself to slow down and capture a narrative that, as she explained, “unravels at a geological pace.” She began working with a medium format camera and cultivated a deliberate and contemplative form of portraiture distinct from her kinetic reportage approach in order to more critically engage with the subtle but no less pressing stakes of this story. Alford extrapolated the dire significance of racism and climate change for the country as a whole. “What is being lost on the coast of Louisiana is more than a neighborhood, or a storm buffer,” she affirmed. “It’s a piece of our collective memory and a unique piece of heritage that defines us as a nation.”

The High first exhibited Bottom of Da Boot in 2012 alongside Shave Lavalette and Martin Parr. Alford published the work as a monograph with Fall Line Press that same year.