Direct-Pages.comDirect Pages is the internet project of Blogs Content Syndication

Cajun oysterman Flip Tayamen with crude oil that leaked into Barataria Bay (part of Mississippi River delta) from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in Port Sulpher, Louisiana © James Balog

Jim says:  I was trying to get into the visceral heart of the catastrophe. This is not just a “spill,” a word that makes it sound like its a messy little puddle of milk that a child spilled on a dining room table. This is an epic breakdown of technology and of the human response to that breakdown. In the shots at “The Source,” I’m trying to give an impression of a scene that echoes the naval battles in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The impact in the hearts of the people comes through in the portraits of the oysterman and shrimpers. The raw evisceration of the earth is represented in the shot of the oil grasses, with the useless containment boom washed up on the shore of an island. Finally, the entire episode has at its heart a bitter paradox: the difference in power between the equipment of oil production and the equipment of oil protection. The power of people and technology and intellectual capital and money is hinted at in the fantastic drilling hardware that’s out at The Source. In contrast, look at the shot of the containment boom anchored in place with a couple of bamboo wands and two-inch PVC stakes: once the oil gets close to shore–and that happened almost continuousyly for the first two months of this fiasco–these flimsy little booms are the best protection modern technology can provide. The boom and their anchors are no more substantial than the fishing weirs used by subsistence fishermen thousands of years ago. In fact, mild squalls and sea chop 1-2 feet high are sufficient to tear the booms right off their moorings, as we witnessed time and again, allowing the oil to keep on coming…

View the entire slideshow of James’ images

All of us have a flawed impression of what oil actually is, because we expereince it only as engine oil for our cars or in small cans of lubricant. In fact, it is a hideously viscous toxin, made up of the still-decaying corpses of ancient marine life. Anything that it touches becomes coated with a huge variety of volatile organic compounds that are poisonous to all forms of life. Go to an oil field like Prudhoe Bay and guess what? You never actually see crude oil: the industry keeps it hidden from view all the way from wellhead to pipeline to tanker to refinery, so unpleasant is the smell of the stuff.

To see more stock photography by James Balog, visit Aurora Photos.

To see James’ assignment portfolio, visit Aurora Select.