Southbound Project
The Southbound project includes ten images from the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. With the cleanup costing as much as the currency-crisis bailouts of countries in Europe over the Great Recession, the impacts of the BP spill will be felt in the Gulf for decades to come. In these photographs, flotillas of cleanup vessels cluster, a phalanx atop the waves, as ships power toward them and then away, seemingly full of purpose, as evidenced by the straight lines they draw across the sludge of petroleum, dispersant, and poisoned water. Seeing ships floating on a sea of toxins that extended over some 70,000 square miles.
Created by Madrid based photographer, Daniel Beltrá, who studied forestry engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and biology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He makes environmental photography that is concerned with the collision of man and nature, nowhere more arrestingly than in his otherworldly visions from the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of North America’s largest-ever oil spill and chemical-dispersant cleanup.