Adrianna Ault: Levee

Adrianna Ault was raised in New Orleans where a 350 mile levee system controls and holds back flood waters. This project began as Ault attempted to better understand the landscape surrounding the city, but evolved over the course of 5-years to encompass her changing family, journeys they took and the processing of grief. The levee became a metaphor for the barriers built in an attempt to ward off inevitable decline, and the onslaught of time and nature.

“I discovered how the surrounding city's waterways exposed the land to a constant state of vulnerability. The physical landscape is parallel to an emotional landscape rooted within the culture of New Orleans and its people."

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 in a different way, with a quietness and slowness—and in this she found sanctuary.

Adrianna Ault (b.1972) is an American photographer. Her practice is deeply motivated by a desire to explore change within grief, time, and the abstraction of memory. 'Levee', published by Void, is her debut monograph. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York.