Adulthood looks different when you are born on polluted lands. Violence becomes the catalyst of understanding your heritage and future. Safety is never promised, and healthiness becomes a privilege.

   I created these images to better understand the ways that violence truly operates within the world I was brought up. Without recognizing how we treat the land around us, the animals, and the people who fall victim, we’ve normalized a world where people are laid to rest next to chemical storage tanks. Animals rely on runoff waste-water to stay alive and community spaces are replaced with smokestacks.

  Through making these images, I questioned how we protect the people who are learning to navigate this landscape and how cycles of violence can be disrupted purely by the existence of people who refuse to stand with it.

          All these images were made within the heart of Cancer Alley, a stretch of land following the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which is home to over 150 petrochemical plants, and has some of the highest cancer rates in the world. Growing up here, I have learned a complex dynamic between life and death, home and industry, and history and reality. Historical sites have been reduced to corporate profit, mourning has become more common than celebrations, and inherited items become symbols of the violence that came before me.

     These images removed from the suffering that exists here, I push the viewers to see the spaces of suffering rather than the emotions that victims are subjected to. An individual becomes a vessel for all around them. Buildings are built to crumble.  It is not a question of if we will leave, but a reality of who is able to.