When photographer Frank Relle was nine years old, he remembers sneaking out of the house he grew up in in New Orleans just before daybreak to catch the sunrise—an event he found frustratingly difficult to explain to others, as much as he wished to share the experience. It was only years later that he discovered the camera, and he reflects on this time now through the lens of an excerpt from the essay “Between Yes and No” by Albert Camus: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
Relle adds, “The swamp was that opening for me. I do not fully understand how. I went in once, and something happened; I changed, and then I kept going back.” The New Orleans-based photographer still returns to the swamps of Louisiana, watched over by bald cypress trees draped in ethereal swathes of Spanish moss. He canoes onto the calm waters, capturing the transition between day and night amid the sounds of birds and other creatures that make their homes there.
“I work in the swamp because it returns me to a way of being that feels older, quieter, and more true,” Relle tells Colossal, continuing:
Out there, surrounded by trees, insects, birds, reflections, and dark water, I stop living inside the noise of my own mind. The swamp pulls me out of the island of myself and places me back inside a larger living world. In that state, I feel wonder, connection, and a kind of freedom. Photography became my way of sharing that feeling—not by explaining it but by inviting others into it.
Relle’s series Until the Water explores Louisiana’s otherworldly bayous through a lens of serene reverence. He places lights beneath boughs and trunks, illuminating trees against darkening horizons to emphasize their billowing shapes amid expansive wetlands distinctive to the Gulf Coast region of North America.
Time is both evident and seemingly suspended in Relle’s photos, as within the context of a single day ending or beginning, we observe mature cypresses that may have weathered hundreds of years. (The oldest known living tree in eastern North America is a bald cypress in North Carolina that’s more than 2,600 years old.) Some of the trees are abundantly leafy and full, while others are bare, struggling, or cracked open.
“The swamp at two in the morning is not quiet; it is one of the loudest places I have ever been,” Relle says. “But a photograph of it is silent. And in that silence, there is an opening. A threshold….That is what I wanted when I was small, watching the sky change. Not to describe it. To bring someone else to the edge of it. To share it without words.”
Find more on Relle’s Instagram, and purchase prints in his online shop. And if you’re in New Orleans, visit his brick-and-mortar gallery on Royal Street.
