Virginia Hanusik, aware of the camera’s urge to turn tragedy to spectacle, breaks with the usual aerial footage of natural disasters. Instead, she depicts a daily reality shaped by the same water it looks to soon be consumed by. Rather than depict catastrophe, she shows the landscape itself to be a warning – the cover, a tree grown crooked from a mutilated base and recurring images of houses precariously balanced on stilts. An architecture of crisis with a base of outdated, precast concrete and subsequent solutions added on. Yet these 15 ft poles only secure individual homes, leaving the roots of destruction untouched. Imani Jacqueline Brown captures this beautifully in her included piece: “But if Louisiana's wetlands have been lost, who lost them? No hands raised, no names named. A territory conquered without flags. Yet the architects of our disintegration are knowable, perceptible. We see their logos planted like colonizers' flags on our schools and festivals, emblazoning our basketball courts and lurking within our courts of law — a crude diversion.”

Despite such valuable contextualisation, I’m not sure that Hanusik is right when she claims that “This book resists that spectacle.” Citing Robert Adams, she confirms the urge to leave behind the shock of violence and “discover[] things in sunlight” through the viewfinder. Though you can hear the voices of its inhabitants, you may also notice the voice of Burtynsky in ‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’ who, standing in the midst of a town tearing itself apart to make space for a dam, mutters the detached “beautiful” of the photographer.