Jeff Whetstone – Batture Ritual

Jeff Whetstone’s photographs and videos explore the micro- and macro-economies and ecologies along the Mississippi River’s batture near New Orleans, Louisiana. “Batture” is the French-creole term for the thin strip of weeds, trees, and mud between the water’s edge of the Mississippi River and the tall, hardened levees that contain its floods. The batture is ephemeral. It disappears when the river is high and re-emerges when the tide falls; it is swept and transformed. It is a cyclical land, untied to human time, unclaimed, and unowned, a temporary alluvial wilderness. Families fishing for food come within feet of international oil tankers and container ships that facilitate global trade. Whetstone does not depict the batture as a dividing line, but rather a magnet that draws all manner of life into contact.

Whetstone portrays this interstitial zone with a nocturnal palette lit by industrial light sources, ship’s beacons, and the full moon. The stark architecture of cargo ships provides a background to Whetstone’s portraits of fishermen and women lit by the slanting light across the flood plain. Close-ups of gutted catfish gleaming with jewel-like flies, a coiled snake wrapped around a man’s wrist like an amulet, transform the site’s role of an industrial trade artery into a place of ritual and sacrifice.

At the center of Batture Ritual series is a 24-minute video that charts the course of a day on the river’s edge. The video was shot over the span of two years, and Whetstone positioned his camera on a singular willow tree and recorded, as Eva Diaz of 4Columns recounts, “enormous container ships from parts international … moving doggedly along the Mississippi, dwarfing but not extinguishing the precarious existence of the men and women who haunt the spaces no one else uses, and presenting an affecting document of the gleaners and gatherers—the fisherman, snake catchers, and flotsam collectors—that capitalism neglects.”