LEVEE, Adrianna Ault, Void

8.27 × 11 in
112 pages
Open spine hardcover
Void, 2023
First edition of 750

“Amongst the unstoppable changing world, the chaos, the growth, the loss, the laughter, and tears there came to a point where I couldn't breathe. I felt as though I was drowning. I went out to the levee on the Mississippi River by my mother's house and walked with my camera.” —Adrianna Ault

This debut monograph by Adrianna Ault invites us to embark on a journey of healing as she navigates the complexities of loss in her mother's passing. What began as a project intended to better understand the surrounding landscape of her hometown of New Orleans, where a 350-mile levee system controls and holds back flood waters, evolved over the years to encompass her changing family, journeys they took, and the processing of grief. Along the Mississippi River, she discovered how the surrounding waterways of New Orleans expose the land to a constant state of vulnerability, where the physical landscape parallels the emotional landscape rooted within the culture of the city and its people, and the levee became metaphor for the barriers built in an attempt to ward off inevitable decline, and the onslaught of time and nature. 

Ault began photographing in 2017 and the final images in this new book were made in 2022. Alongside photographs of the landscape of New Orleans and the Hudson Valley, she photographed her children, and her mother’s final car journey from Rhinebeck, NY to her mother’s home in New Orleans, LA. The act of making photographs allowed Ault to see and process the world differently, with a quietness and slowness in which she found sanctuary.