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“Amongst the unstoppable changing world, the chaos, the growth, the loss, the laughter, and tears there came to a point where I couldn't breathe. I felt as though I was drowning. I went out to the levee on the Mississippi River by my mother's house and walked with my camera.” - Adrianna Ault

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.”

“Making pictures in this place was not outside of the pain of losing my mother or the joy and wild ride of being one, rather it was beyond it. It is a quiet place to rest and feel the heart-sinking loss and what is found along the way.” - Adrianna Ault

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 raised in New Orleans, LA. 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.