In this series, Lagniappe presents works from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, with commentary from a curator.
In recent weeks, salt has been on the tips of many tongues in southern Louisiana. While the saltwater intrusion creeping up the Mississippi River seems unlikely to reach New Orleans, the realities of climate change suggest that the saltwater wedge will become a more regular visitor.
To cope with such a brackish future, let’s turn to photography, where salt has played a historically outsized role. In the 1830s, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the salt print — the first process that could produce unlimited prints from a single negative — by combining a salt solution with silver nitrate.
Gustave Le Gray, who created the salt print "Sea and Sky," was perhaps the most important photographer in France in the 1850s. Eventually, Le Gray turned his focus to seascapes, which posed the particular challenge of making the correct exposure for the water and sky.
Le Gray used combination printing — matching two properly exposed negatives so that the result is a single cohesive picture.
Le Gray’s seascapes proved a sensation when he debuted them in London in 1856 and remain beautiful renderings of the natural world. We can also appreciate this photograph on an elemental level, it is also a picture of salt: in the waves and sea spray and in the material makeup of the print itself.
Let it be a reminder of the continued acceleration of climate change and a call to action in the face of that threat. Salt water is great for photography, but less so for our drinking water.
Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings