Norco, 2015 – View across flooded Bonnet Carre Spillway to Norco petrochemical facilities; from near Norco.

The images from Richard Sexton’s exhibition, Enigmatic Stream:Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River, depict the Mississippi River industrial corridor from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Sextons photographs, made between 2003 and 2016 mainly with the Leica M Monochrom, present the industrial structures and activities that line both banks of the countrys largest waterway.

Excerpts from the exhibition catalog for Enigmatic Stream:
I am intrigued by the unrelenting human effort to exploit the rivers commercial potential . . . [and] the industrial design of this landscape. It is engineering in its purest form, unfettered by aesthetic issues, artistic aspiration, or pretension. . . . And yet . . . the landscape is filled with incongruity and mystery. Richard Sexton

There is . . . a majesty and audaciousness about humanitys corporate additions to the river landscape. They are awesome, in the nineteenth-century use of the word . . . equally tinged with both beauty and horror. Paul Schneider, essayist and author of Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History

The Mississippi is sinuous, mysterious, and fluidat odds with the angular, obvious, and rigid structures that line its banks or float on its surface. Sextons overriding viewpoint is one that celebrates the juxtaposition of this natural feature with the complex man-made structures that are born from its existence. John H. Lawrence, essayist and director of museum programs at The Historic New Orleans Collection

• Paper Size: 20×24 inches
• Image Size: 11×17 inches
• Inkjet print on Epson Hot Press Natural, an acid free, 100% cotton rag media with a natural smooth finish.

  *All the prints in this exhibition are one-of-a-kind, which means that only one will be available for sale. The delivery of this print will occur when the show comes down (after August 20th). All prints are artists proofs.

Sexton received the 2014 Michael P. Smith Memorial Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and was an award recipient in American Photographys Latin America Fotografa annual competition.

In 1997 Sexton curated the exhibit Sidney Bechet: A World of Jazz 1897-1997, which commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the influential jazz musicians birth. Sexton has had two major exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The first exhibit in 2005 featured work from his self-published, handmade art book, The Highway of Temptation and Redemption: A Gothic Travelogue in Two Dimensions. The second exhibit in 2007 featured work from Terra Incognita. This exhibit has subsequently traveled to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, the Pensacola Museum of Art in Pensacola, Florida, and the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida. Creole World, his first exhibit for The Historic New Orleans Collection, was on view at the Laura Simon Nelson Galleries for Louisiana Art from April 15, through December 7, 2014. The exhibit is now traveling to other venues. The first travel venue was Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami and in 2016 it traveled to Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College in Shreveport, LA, and then to the Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, LA.

Sextons photographs are included in the holdings of The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LSU Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art, Frost Art Museum, Pensacola Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, and numerous private collections.

To view more of Richard’s work, visit hiswebsite.