Life in the Red Stick

I've been conditioned from birth to hate Baton Rouge. It's a steaming concrete mass; a Northern city weirdly imposing itself on our state; a big city of small-minded yahoos doing their best to undermine everything we Cajuns and Creoles set out to do. It's fitting (and upsettingly so) that it's home to our Capitol Building, the tallest in the U.S., and home of some of the most corrupt and/or incompetent politicians in the nation. My father refers to it as Huey Long's stone phallus. It's the first thing you see of the city when approaching from the West, and it stands as a monument to the hubristic, greedy, self-centered desires that have fueled Louisiana politicians since time immemorial. Despite the affinity for nature and distrust of corporations that's within every Louisianan, our politicians routinely vote against our interests and whore out our beautiful country to oil and natural gas companies.

This is why “View of Exxon Refinery” by Richard Misrach hits home. It's from a viewing area on the Capitol looking out across the city, with the Mississippi River constituting the foreground and the smokestacks of the eponymous refinery making up the background. A significant portion of the image is given to the viewing area itself, a narrow gray walkway fairly high up with an unoccupied viewfinder. It points out directly perpendicular to the camera, focused on the cancerous scar of the refinery in the distance. A small but distinctly legible sign reads “For Distant Viewing” in all capital letters on the device. Smog gradually blends in with the low nimbus clouds hanging ominously above the city.

The photograph captures the bleakness of Baton Rouge, the hopelessness. Our politicians don't even look at what's happening to the land they represent. They can't see the aggressive and wanton destruction at the hands of the same companies that destroyed our coast in the oil spill. Considerations of the environment still have the looming ugly concrete of the Capitol thrust unnaturally into them, like the photograph. Everything comes back to the economic impact, or more likely, the chances of reelection for the congresspeople. Misrach's picture does what photography should do: Force us to face the gross unpleasant truth of a situation that everybody would just prefer to ignore.