The great egret lives in the bayous of Louisiana. Tall and graceful, it stands at the water’s edge on stilt-like legs waiting in statuesque stillness for fish. Underneath the dark cloth of his cumbersome 8 x 10 view camera, photographer Yojiro Imasaka waits patiently in the oppressive Louisiana humidity for a photograph to reveal itself. The slim legs of the tripod are slightly sunken into the damp earth, resembling a large, strange bayou bird.
The term bayou is from the Choctaw word “bayok,” meaning a small stream. The bayous in the Southeastern United States are among the most distinctive natural environments in the world. Born and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, Imasaka was intrigued by the famed geography and cultural legends of the low-lying delta at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Following his move to the United States, Imasaka photographed in the Catskills, Hawaiian islands, the Rocky Mountains, and the coast of Maine, yet the shallow and heavily wooded landscape of the bayou was unlike any the Japanese native had ever seen. He found a spiritual connection with the submerged forest’s huge cypress trees and dripping mosses. Immersing himself in its mysterious atmosphere for several months, Imasaka produced a series of stunning, large-scale and richly detailed photographs of the “blue bayou.”
Blue Bayou 4/courtesy Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery
The series shares its title with the ballad made famous by Roy Orbison in the 1960s. “I’m going back someday/Come what may/To Blue Bayou/Where the folks are fun/And the world is mine...” Despite what the lyrics suggest, the bayous are not, in fact, blue but a palate of greens, yellows, and browns. Under the red light of the darkroom, Imasaka transforms his black-and-white negatives into steely-blue gelatin silver prints through an elaborate process of his own invention. This allows him to realize the landscape not as he saw it, but as he felt it. In some images, the light on the lush vegetation appears white, like a dusting of surreal snowfall. The blue in these photographs, as it is in Orbison’s song, is a nostalgic filter. The coolness of the color recalls an earlier era of photography. Its dream-like quality stirs a longing to return to a place we have never been.
Despite the vast ecological differences between Japan and the bayous, there are familiar elements found in both, such as the great egret. Dense plant species including alligator weed and water hyacinth run wild throughout the bayou waters in the same manner that Japanese kudzu chokes out the sunlight. Imasaka photographs with an infinite depth of field, compressing the layers of overgrowth into a two-dimensional tangle of vines, tree limbs, and algae. Printed at large scale (32 x 40 inches), the landscape envelopes the viewer. The eye moves frantically among the density of the leaves and the rests in the calm dark water. It could be chaotic, but the consistency of the color cast and the evenness of the light encourages tranquility. We are not overwhelmed, but awed.
Blue Bayou 23/courtesy Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery
Although these salt, fresh, and brackish waters are home to a diversity of wildlife, none, including the great egret, are to be found in Imasaka’s photographs, save for one image with a dissipating water ripple in the foreground, perhaps evidence of a jumping fish or a slowly sinking alligator. Often, it is the quick shutter that records a fraction of a second to pull a moment out of time. Here, Imasaka embraces the slowness of the camera and long exposures to capture the subtlety of slow-moving water and shifting sunlight through vegetation. He is strategic in his depiction of stillness. He says he photographs the bayou “as if I were praying for its everlasting existence.” Indeed, there is a meditative quality to these pictures. Each photograph, made deliberately and with great concentration on his surroundings is like a small prayer to draw the moment out, to suspend time. This stillness isn’t static, it’s electric. One can almost feel the heaviness in the air and hear the buzzing of insects. Imasaka places us alongside him, standing still at the edge of the water and losing all sense of time.
This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.
