New Orleans-based Frank Relle is one of those rare photographers who dare to go all out to get just the right picture. He has spent the better part of two decades wading into the world, quite literally, chest-deep in a bayou, and rigging lights to a flatboat in the dark of night, just for those photo moments.
Frank’s work is grounded in the landscapes and waterways of Southern Louisiana. It carries the weight of one who knows these places. Often, you’d find him on a boat in the middle of a Louisiana swamp, in the dead of night, waiting for the moon and the clouds to cooperate before climbing out and taking the pictures that appear almost otherworldly.
His Roots in the South
Born and raised in New Orleans, Frank grew up surrounded by waterways that have, for years, shaped the rhythm of Louisiana life. The swamps, bayous, and backroads that framed his youth define his creative and artistic views.
He grew up with a natural curiosity about the world around him. His appreciation for storytelling began earlier, through fishing trips, childhood drives along rural dirt roads, and quiet evenings under humid, star-struck skies. He describes staring out the window of his mother's 1982 Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon as a child, and playing ‘I spy’ with his siblings as the Louisiana landscape rolled past.
Frank studied creative writing and photography at Tulane University, where he earned degrees in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. Those disciplines, at first glance, may seem far removed from photography. But looking at them closely, one begins to understand the connection.
His photographs are philosophical in their curiosity about time, memory, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. They naturally speak to his creative eye, not photographing Louisiana from the outside looking in, but capturing it from within, as one might describe a loved one, through long familiarity, subtle detail, and lingering affection.
Into the Swamp
Perhaps Frank’s most enigmatic photographic work, ‘Until the Water’, has drawn the most sustained attention from those who love photography and the natural world. The series explores the bayous, lakes, and swamps of Louisiana. The Louisiana swampland and the Atchafalaya Basin in particular are one of the most ecologically extraordinary places in North America.
Ancient bald cypress trees, some centuries old, rise from the still, dark water with an almost architectural gravity. Spanish moss drapes the trees’ branches like something from a half-remembered dream. The air itself has a quality to it, warm, dense, and layered with nature’s nightly sounds.
Frank spent six years exploring these swamplands by boat to make the photographs, following moon phases and seasonal cycles of high and low water to plan each excursion, each year dedicating between 40 and 60 nights to camping and photographing along the water in different regions throughout the state.
Mostly working actively after dark, he illuminates parts of the swampland that most people hardly see, for the perfect shots. Trees stand suspended in gentle mist, old wooden homes glowing as though still occupied, and the surface of the water mirroring faint streams of gold and night-blue.
Frank:
“The series reminds viewers that the landscape is in a constant state of change, and that within those transformations are moments of both melancholy and transcendent beauty.”
Frank’s pictures portray Louisiana in a different sense: not as wild or shadowed, but with a serene kind of order within the chaos of nature. Through his lens, even decay has beauty: a sunken boat, an abandoned house, or gnarly tree silhouettes provided with detail and depth.
The Process: Light, Water, and Long Exposure
Frank’s photographic process involves rigging a lighting system to his flatboat, then positioning the lights. He climbs out of the boat and composes his photographs from water level, his camera mounted on a custom-built tripod that can stand in up to approximately 7.5 meters of water.
He uses nocturnal long-exposure photography, combining his staged lights with the available light of the moon and stars, producing a stillness that feels almost impossible, and capturing a scene that frames the elements: fixed shadows, slow-moving features, swaying branches, and ripples of wind across the water.
Writer Morgan Babst described his approach so well:
“For Frank, a single image contains many moments. Trees step forward out of the forest. Houses contemplate the lives lived in them. His landscapes are rooted in history.”
That rootedness in history is, in fact, precise. The swamplands of Louisiana carry the weight of centuries of accounts of Indigenous peoples, the French colonial period, Acadian settlers whose descendants became the Cajun people, and generations of fisherfolk and trappers who have lived on and by these waters. Frank's photographs illuminate those histories in a literal sense.
Beauty at the Edge of Loss
In a sense, ‘Until the Water’ carries a subliminal message. The Louisiana coast is disappearing at a rate that alarms scientists and breaks the hearts of those who love it. Land loss, subsidence, and the erosion caused by altered waterways have been reshaping this landscape for years. Frank’s series speaks to the notion that the landscape is in a constant state of change, and that within those changes are moments of both melancholy and transcendent beauty.
The transient loveliness in nature's cycles of loss and recovery presents a place for reflection. There is grief folded into these images, but there is also what feels very much like the love of a person who knows a place so deeply and photographs it because photographing is also countersigning it.
An Ambitious Project
Most recently, Frank undertook what may, perhaps, be the most ambitious single project of his career: a roughly 7.6-meter-wide, 5.2-meter-tall photograph of a centuries-old cypress tree, made beneath the towering columns of the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge. He worked with 12 collaborators, navigating wind, water, and rigging challenges, and keeping an eye on at least one curious alligator.
The project was created to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, honoring the connection between Louisiana's natural history and the engineering that allows its people to live alongside these waters. It is the kind of photograph that could only come from someone who has spent years understanding this landscape.
Frank’s gallery sits at 910 Royal Street in New Orleans, housed in the historic Miltenberger House, once the home of the Princess of Monaco. It is a fitting address for work that bridges the lyrical and the historical. For those who cannot make it to the French Quarter, his full collection is available through his online gallery at frankrellegallery.com.
Photos by Frank Relle (@frankrelle).
