Everglades

📖 The Scoop

The South Florida national park known as the Everglades, home to staggering numbers of plants and animals, is to wetlands what Kilimanjaro is to mountains, the Amazon to rivers, or the Grand Canyon to cracks in the Earth. Like these iconic places, the Everglades is singular and sublime. Nothing remotely matches it. In these photographs, Mary Peck shows us how to look at the Everglades.This is a world where clouds lie low over the water, and vast, thick clumps of mangrove confuse our sense of perspective. Our eyes hunger for a focal point around which to organize the visual data we perceive--something missing from the mangrove and cypress jungles of the Everglades. Peck teases out the architecture of swamps and forests, allowing us to see beyond their illusory surfaceBefore South Florida was developed, the Everglades was one continuous sheet of water covering the southern half of the Florida peninsula. Less than half the original Everglades survived development. Once a densely packed forest of sawgrass, now diminished and relatively desiccated, the Everglades persists, in the vivid words of author William deBuys, "as a kind of inundated Kansas of water, grass, and muck," ending in the dense mangroves forest that edge the sea.Mary Peck grew up in Ft. Lauderdale, barely an hour away from the Everglades but separated from the wetlands by air conditioning and pavement. When Peck revisited South Florida as an adult, she saw the Everglades for the first time. Her photographs combine with deBuys's account of the natural and political history of the Everglades and his travels through the swamp to underline the tension between awe at the power of our experience in wild places today and the knowledge that those very places are being lost if not already gone.

Genre: Photography / General (fancy, right?)