When tackling a huge, abstract photo project, it helps to set some parameters. For Jeff Rich and his Watershed Project, they were: Every photo must deal directly with some aspect of the river; focus on either pollution, control or stewardship; and finally, be something that you’d want to hang in your living room.
“The whole project is about awareness,” says Rich, an assistant professor of photography at the University of Iowa. “It’s about helping people understand how a watershed is just an organization of smaller parts.”
A watershed is the name for an exit point of a basin that collects surface water from rain or melting ice. Many big rivers such as the Mississippi and the Amazon have them. Rich chose to start the project with the 213-mile-long French Broad river since it was close to his home in Asheville, North Carolina. To get a sense for who and what mattered in terms of his three categories, Rich contacted Hartwell Carson, the French Broad river keeper and part of an environmental organization called the Waterkeeper Alliance, which was founded in 1999 with the purpose of helping local communities protect their regional water resources.
Back in the 1950s, the French Broad was one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Heavy industry nears its shores, erosion due to deforestation and nearby urban areas had not been kind. Things got better in the 1970s thanks to the passage of the Clean Water Act, but Rich says the river is still under threat.
Carson pointed him to the most polluted sites along the French Broad and its tributaries. Rich made photos of buildings along the shores like paper mills and cement plants. From there, he started to think more locally and tried to meet people who depended on the river or the tributaries for their livelihood and people who used the rivers for recreation. Over time the project became an ethnographic study of both the French Broad and the people around it.
After four years of documenting the French Broad, Rush thought he was done photographing water. But then the dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County ruptured and spilled 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry into the surrounding area, including several rivers that flow into the Tennessee. Rich photographed the event and he eventually decided to expand and start documenting the Tennessee river.
“It was the logical next step to keep going down the river,” Rich says. “And the Tennessee is a completely different body of water so it would create a different body of work.”
On the Tennessee, Rich has concentrated on the river as a source for electricity. Back in 1933, Roosevelt helped create the TVA, a federally owned corporation with the goal of helping residents in the Tennessee Valley overcome their dire poverty, which was bad even in comparison to other post-depression areas. One of the biggest projects in the TVA was the creation of affordable energy through hydroelectric dams.
Today, there are 29 TVA dams, a couple of which appear in Rich’s photos. He’s also documented other power sources — coal, nuclear — that are part of the TVA which is still publicly owned and one of the largest producers of electricity in the country.
Rich’s newest piece in the Watershed Project looks at the Mississippi River — the largest drainage system in North America — because that’s the river the Tennessee empties into. To try and keep it manageable, he’s only photographing the sections south of St. Louis and concentrating on how the Army Corp of Engineers try to control the behemoth.
“I’ve had to be careful about setting some boundaries,” he says.
All the work is shot on film with either 4×5 or 8×10 camera. Rich says he wanted to shoot larger format work because he liked the sharpness and depth of field you get on negatives that size. But it also slowed him down and created a pace to the photos that feels similar to that of the rivers he’s photographed.
The first chapter of the Watershed Project won the Photolucida Critical Mass photo contest back in 2010 and was then published as a book. Rich hopes that when the Tennessee section is done that it will also become a book. Same for the Mississippi section. In the meantime, to try and put all three chapters into conversation Rich built an interactive website with maps and the photos.
After the Mississippi section of the project is done — there’s no hard deadline — Rich says the Watershed Project will finally be finished.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.