Click any image to view slideshow.
Enigmatic Stream: Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River
by Richard Sexton with essays by Paul Schneider and John H. Lawrence
Published by The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-917860-75-1
$40 retail; 140 pages; 91 photographs
SYNOPSIS, from the publisher
For hundreds of years the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana has supported a steady flow of human enterprise. In the last century, heavy industry has transformed this landscape. Towering refineries, mills, and factories loom over a river network plied by tankers, barges, and cargo ships. In Enigmatic Stream, author and photographer Richard Sexton documents this region’s commercial infrastructure and its relationship with the people and environment around it. Through nearly one hundred black and white photographs, this book captures the essence of a complicated and often mysterious section of the country’s largest waterway.
Advanced praise for Enigmatic Stream
Without judgment of the industrial present or nostalgia for a preindustrial past, Sexton’s photographs capture a multitude of rich and fraught histories that have shaped this distinctive region of Louisiana. With sharpness, clarity of vision, and unerring compositional focus, Sexton frames landscapes that balance the tension between energy and stillness.
—Jordana Pomeroy, director, Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami
To view Enigmatic Stream on the web site of The Historic New Orleans Collection click here
To view the press release for the exhibition and book launch click on the link here: EnigmaticStreamPressRelease
Enigmatic Stream is featured in the Oxford American’s “Eyes on the South” blog here.
Susan Larson interviews Richard Sexton about Enigmatic Stream for The Reading Life. Listen here: https://www.wwno.org/post/reading-life-richard-sexton-and-poppy-tooker.
Leann Alspaugh reviews Enigmatic Stream for The New Criterion. Read it here.
Nicole Javorsky interviews Richard Sexton about Enigmatic Stream for THE HILL. Read it here.
Andru Okun interviews Richard Sexton for the January 2020 issue of Antigravity. Read it here.
Lauren Heffker interviews Richard Sexton and reviews Enigmatic Stream for the February 2020 issue of Country Roads. Read it here.
Enigmatic Stream editor Nick Weldon interviews Richard Sexton and “Norco” video game designer Yuts. Read it here: https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/dragons-norco-game-developer-and-photographer-discuss-complicated-beauty