Cahn-Lawrence Photography Lecture 2024
A Vanishing Bounty
Free admission with registration required
Contemporary Louisiana photographers J. T. Blatty, Kristie Cornell, and Virginia Hanusik have turned their lenses on the vanishing environments and cultures of south Louisiana. Presented in conjunction with the annual PhotoNOLA festival, HNOC's 2024 Jules L. Cahn John H. Lawrence Photography Lecture will bring these powerful artists together to share their projects, photographic practices, and distinctive visions.
Our coastal region’s diversity of animal life and plentiful natural resources have attracted human habitation and industry. But a number of factors—erosion caused by oil exploration and the destruction of cypress swamps, invasive species that threaten to crowd out native plants and animals, and climate change, which raises sea levels and creates stronger hurricanes—both implicate and complicate the human presence in the coastal region. Blatty, Cornell, and Hanusik capture this dynamic environment with reverence for what is being lost, but also appreciation for the beauty that remains.
The lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition A Vanishing Bounty: Louisiana’s Coastal Environment and Culture, currently on view at the Historic New Orleans Collection. Complimentary light refreshments will be served.
Header image: photograph (detail) by and courtesy of Kristie Cornell
Speakers
J. T. Blatty
Raised in Louisiana, Jenn Tuero (J. T.) Blatty is an award-winning documentary photographer, photojournalist, and Fulbright alum. Blatty is the author of Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Fishing Communities, a project focused on preserving the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana’s multigenerational fishing communities. A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Blatty served six years as an active-duty US Army officer before pursuing a career in photojournalism. Since 2018, she has been documenting the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and she recently published a military memoir that speaks of her journey in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Her work has been exhibited in Ukraine, Russia, and Argentina and has been featured in CNN Photos, Charleston Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Daily Beast, Savannah Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, and USA Today, among other publications. Blatty’s work is represented by Redux Pictures and the Martine Chaisson Gallery (New Orleans).
Kristie Cornell
Kristie Cornell is a self-taught photographer from Lafayette, Louisiana. Trained as a scientist, she walks the line between the scientific and artistic worlds. Her work focuses on her relationship to place, specifically to the natural and cultural landscapes of her native Louisiana. Making photographs is Kristie’s way of truly seeing and understanding a place. She strives to capture images that bring her experience and appreciation of the landscape to the viewer. Her work has been exhibited regionally at venues including the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Basin Arts, and the New Orleans Photo Alliance, and was included in the 2024 Louisiana Contemporary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
Virginia Hanusik
Virginia Hanusik is an artist and writer whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment. Her work has been exhibited internationally; featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Places Journal, The Atlantic, MAS Context, and Oxford American, among others; and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, Landmark Columbus Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. She regularly writes and speaks on landscape representation and the visual narrative of climate change, and she serves on the board of directors of the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, where she coordinates multidisciplinary projects on the climate crisis.
Hanusik has been a recipient of the Decade of Change Award (2020); a Photography Fellow with Exhibit Columbus (2020–2021), where her multiyear project on the Mississippi River watershed explored the history of flooding and politics of disasters in the region; a Rising: Climate in Crisis Resident at Tulane University’s Studio in the Woods (2022), and a Creative Capital Award finalist (2022). Her book, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, was published in summer 2024