Ben Depp: Imaginal Stage
December 4, 2021 – March 4, 2022
A Gallery for Fine Photography is pleased to present, Imaginal Stage, a collection of eight pigment prints by contemporary artist Ben Depp. This work is part of Depp’s ongoing project documenting the rapidly shifting landscape of southern Louisiana. To make intimate landscape photographs, he learned to fly a powered paraglider. The paraglider allows him to spend hours aloft, waiting for light and searching for compositions to memorialize this place.
“My photographs capture South Louisiana in its imaginal stage – the moment between its emergence as solid ground and its disappearance.”
-Ben Depp
Ben Depp’s Imaginal Stage will be on through March 4, 2022.
“Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!”
– Epic of Gilgamesh
“When I first encountered a cloud of mayflies on a summer flight in Plaquemines Parish, I was moved by the parallel between the ephemeral insect and the South Louisiana wetlands. In the final stage of its metamorphosis – called the imaginal stage – a mayfly molts and emerges from the water to live for a single day. On a geologic time scale, South Louisiana’s lifespan seems just as transitory. South Louisiana is the youngest part of this 200 million year-old continent, built from sediment carried down the Mississippi River over the last six thousand years. It is also the first swath of the continent now reverting to open water.”
-Ben Depp