In February I drove down to Houma, Louisiana to begin photographing the Daneco Alligator Farm. They were just beginning to deal with the impact the recession was having on their industry and with 14,000 skins in cold storage without a buyer, had more or less paused their operations in the hopes that the economy would right itself and set them back on track. When I returned in May things had not improved but the Ledet family had decided that it was time for them to continue trying to run their business, even if the buyers weren’t there. It is incredibly chaotic at the farm when the skinning is taking place. No time to sit, talk, make portraits or to ask questions. The assembly line starts at the crack of dawn with migrant workers climbing into the containers where the alligators are raised, grabbing them with their bare hands, taping their mouths shut and tossing them into containers where they are then sorted by size. From the growing buildings they are taken to the skinning room where the alligators are killed with a knife through the brain before being put on the skinning line. By the time they are done all of the parts have been separated, most of them utilized, from the skins to the meat. 

Tomorrow I return to Mississippi and Louisiana to continue two separate personal projects. While in Louisiana I will be spending time with the Daneco folks during egg collection which will constitute another piece of this final project. Last week I finalized some dates for the first solo exhibition of this work, which is scheduled to open at Lorrie Saunders Art Gallery in Norfolk, Virginia on January 29, 2011. I’m happy to have an outlet for these images as I continue making trips to the Deep South and am curious to hear what the public response to the work will be within the context of a gallery. Below are a few frames from the skinning process that will be woven together with images from the hunt and my earlier trip to the farm, which consisted more of portraits and still life images. For this post I lack the time to weave a text narrative of my trip to Houma, but I will leave you with a short note scrawled in my notebook from this last visit.

“5/25/10 - A hot spring day in Louisiana, I sit listening to the whine of power washers as the migrant workers blow the flesh from the gator hides while another group of men work in the adjoining room in a skinning assembly line. The Ledet family seems more pessimistic this visit than the last as business still hasn’t picked up. From my seat in the shade I watch the kids roll by on the Bad Boy buggy, trying to entertain themselves as I try to rest my eyes and save some energy to make new pictures today instead of just repeating myself…”

In front of a church down the road from Daneco Alligator Farm, on Bayou Black

In February I drove down to Houma, Louisiana to begin photographing the Daneco Alligator Farm. They were just beginning to deal with the impact the recession was having on their industry and with 14,000 skins in cold storage without a buyer, had more or less paused their operations in the hopes that the economy ...