"Oysterplanting..."

I just finished making a selection and draft printing the images from which my submission for the documentary photography  grant I am working on will be ‘culled.’ Zandy is going to do that for me, I am a terrible editor. This is one of my favorite images from the pile, although technically it is pretty lousy. I have written about oysterplanting numerous times previously, and won’t rehash all of it here., except to say that it was in August, and we were out on oyster bars in the Gulf of Mexico. The best way to describe the heat out there is to quote the character Matthew Broderick played in the movie Biloxi Blues. I think it was when he stepped off the train in Bilioxi, Mississippi and remarked: “Man it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.” That’s how hot it was and Jeanine and her crew worked, without a break, loading clumps of oysters into buckets, carrying them onto her boat and then taking them out to deeper water to ‘replant’ them, so they would grow better. Fortunately for me a thunderstorm came up early in the afternoon and we had to head back home.

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