Louisiana
The Vanishing Coast of Louisiana
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Along the bayous of Louisiana, south of New Orleans, five Native American settlements are clinging to disappearing earth. Their homes outline the narrow strips of land deposited by the Mississippi Delta like the fingers of a skeletal hand disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Southeast Louisiana is losing this land at an alarming rate—approximately a football field of land every 100 minutes—mostly due to human impacts of oil and gas extraction, subsidence, sea level rise, and increasingly damaging hurricanes brought by climate change. The people who make their homes here are continually seeking and finding creative solutions. A role they’ve taken on for centuries.
Many can trace their roots in the area to the 18th and 19th centuries, when a small number of Choctaw, Chitimacha, and other Native Americans—including some of my maternal ancestors—survived the vagaries of colonial settlement, wars, and waves of Indian removal policies in the remote coastal marshes of southeast Louisiana.
Over generations, they formed unique communities descended from a handful of shared Native American ancestors who intermingled with French and other European settlers. Here they farmed, raised animals, trapped, fished, and grew into large families for generations—until massive coastal erosion began eating away at the land.
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I have been photographing two of these communities, Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes, since 2005. In 2024, I returned to the project after a 12-year hiatus. In many cases, I ended up photographing the same location with more than a decade between each image.
Most of the residents of Isle de Jean Charles—which was featured in the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild—have recently relocated together to a new community called New Isle, 33 miles farther inland. As a result, the community is far less inhabited now than it was when I last visited—I see plants and animals filling in the spaces that humans have vacated.
In this selection of photographs, I attempt to crystalize changes happening at both a geological and a human time scale so that they are more observable. The cycles of storm damage and recovery, erosion and displacement, are becoming more visible by the year. Developing relationships with people and landscape, I have come to see the fluid and powerful dynamics of loss and adaptability, the fragility and the strength of humans and a rapidly shifting ecosystem.
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Left: January 2009
Sign at the entrance to Isle de Jean Charles.
Right: August 2024
Sign in front of a house on Island Road, Isle de Jean Charles.
Left: August 2010
Susie Danos in her garden on Isle de Jean Charles where she grew melons, cucumbers, beans, and okra. After years of storm flooding, some residents fear that the soil is contaminated by residue from offshore oil drilling. Frequent salt water intrusion kills plants and trees like the dead oak tree visible in the background.
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Right: September 2024
The site of Susie Danos’ gardens in 2024, marked by alligator tracks in the mud left by Hurricane Florence in 2018. Susie has left the island to live with her daughter’s family farther inland.
Left: September 2008
The single road that connects Point-aux-Chenes to Isle de Jean Charles. The road often floods and is in need of frequent repair due to coastal erosion.
Right: September 2024
The single road that connects Point-aux-Chenes to Isle de Jean Charles after Hurricane Francine, looking east. The road has been reinforced with riprap. Drainage pipes have been installed to allow water to recede after flooding.
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Left: November 2009
Edison Dardar, Sr. on his porch in Isle de Jean Charles pictured after flooding receded from the island. Dardar cast for shrimp with a net nearly every day, just a few hundred meters from his house. He was vocal about not wanting to live anywhere other than his home on Isle de Jean Charles.
Right: September 2024
The house of Edison Dardar, Sr. on Isle de Jean Charles pictured after Hurricane Francine hit this year. Dardar died in December 2023 at age 74. He never left his island home.
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Left: January 2010
A dead oak tree, known as a “skeleton tree” en route to Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes. Dead oak trees are a common sight along the eroding coastline of Louisiana. As salt water encroaches, trees and other fresh water flora are dying.
Right: August 2024
The same tree. 
Lead photo by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures
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Louisiana
Mom whose 3 children were killed in Louisiana mass shooting still has bullet lodged in face — and sometimes thinks kids are alive
The mother of three of the eight children massacred by deranged Army veteran dad Shamar Elkins in Louisiana still has a bullet lodged in her head and is struggling with her memory — sometimes believing her kids are still alive, according to a relative.
Christina Snow, the girlfriend of 31-year-old Shamar Elkins, was shot in the face early Sunday when the former National Guardsman went on a shooting rampage at two nearby homes in Shreveport.
Three of Snow’s children she shared with Elkins — Braylon Snow, 5, Khedarrion Snow, 6, and Sariahh Snow, 11 — were killed in their home.
Elkins fired a bullet through Snow’s nose which is lodged in her head, and doctors aren’t ready to risk surgery, according to her cousin Jamarckus Snow.
The mom is now dealing with heartbreaking memory loss about the fate of her kids.
“One day, she’ll remember they’re dead. I heard yesterday she woke up and was like, ‘I got to get my kids ready for school.’ She’ll lose memory of what happened,” he told NBC News.
“One day, she’ll know, and the next day, she’s thinking her kids is still there.”
Follow the latest updates on the Louisiana father who killed 8 children in Shreveport shooting:
Elkins fatally shot his seven children — the three he shared with Snow and his four daughters with his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh: Jayla Elkins, 3, Shayla Elkins, 5, Kayla Pugh, 6, and Layla Pugh, 7.
He also killed Mar’Kaydon Pugh, 10, the son of his wife’s sister, who was staying at their house.
The vet turned his gun on Pugh and Snow, too, severely wounding both women, who are still in the hospital.
Elkins shot himself in the driveway of his former military mentor as law enforcement closed in.
The motive for the shooting remains unclear, but Elkins was suffering from mental health issues and was scheduled to appear in court on Monday after Pugh asked him for a divorce.
Louisiana
Federal appeals court upholds Texas’ Ten Commandments law. What does it mean for Louisiana?
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a Texas law requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, just weeks after the same court allowed a similar Louisiana law to take effect.
A majority of judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ law, which is nearly identical to Louisiana’s, is constitutional and does not violate students’ religious freedom. In February, the court lifted an injunction on Louisiana’s law, which cleared schools to put up the posters, but the judges said it was too early to rule on that law’s constitutionality.
Tuesday’s ruling could bode well for Louisiana’s law if it eventually returns to the 5th Circuit, considered the country’s most conservative federal court of appeals.
In their majority opinion, the judges rejected the argument that posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms would pressure students to honor the biblical mandates or adopt particular beliefs.
“To plaintiffs, merely exposing children to religious language is enough to make the displays engines of coercive indoctrination. We disagree,” the majority wrote about the Texas law, known as S.B. 10. A minority of the court’s active judges dissented.
Even though Tuesday’s ruling only addressed the Texas case, defenders of Louisiana’s legislation celebrated it as a victory. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the 5th Circuit’s argument in upholding Texas’ law was identical to the one Louisiana made in defense of its law.
“Our law clearly was always constitutional,” she posted on X, “and I am grateful that the Fifth Circuit has now definitively agreed with us.”
Louisiana’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed the law in 2024, which requires all public K-12 schools and colleges to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. A group of parents quickly challenged the law in court, and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that stopped the state from enforcing the law.
In February, the 5th Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, saying it had been premature to block the law before it took effect. The judges said they could not rule on the law’s constitutionality before seeing how it played out in schools.
But in the case of Texas’ law, which that state’s Republican-led Legislature passed in 2025, the court did rule on the merits.
Rejecting arguments made by attorneys for the Texas families who challenged the law, the 5th Circuit majority said that requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments does not amount to the government endorsing a particular religion, which the U.S. Constitution forbids. The law also does not impose religious beliefs on students, the judges wrote.
“As noted, S.B. 10 authorizes no religious instruction and gives teachers no license to contradict children’s religious beliefs (or their parents’),” the majority opinion says. “No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin.”
The Texas families were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serving as pro bono counsel. The same groups, including Louisiana’s ACLU chapter, represented the Louisiana families.
In a statement Tuesday, the organizations said they are “extremely disappointed” by the 5th Circuit’s ruling, adding that they expect to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction,” the groups said. “This decision tramples those rights.”
Nearly all major industries in Louisiana added jobs over the past year, signaling momentum for a stronger future, according to a recent report from Leaders for a Better Louisiana.
The organizat…
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