French photographer and visual artist Nicolas Floc’h’s Fleuves-océan project traces the movement of water across our planet, exploring its flow through varied habitats and representing the ways we are all connected by water cycles and systems. This exhibition pairs vibrant monochromatic photographs of the color of water made under the surface with dramatic black-and-white landscape photographs made along the banks of the Mississippi and its tributaries—from Louisiana and across the country.

Nicolas Floc’h documented the entire span of the Mississippi during a 2022 artist residency in the United States with Villa Albertine in collaboration with the Camargo Foundation and Artconnexion. This exhibition, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, is a clarion call illustrating illustrating the importance of a network of water that links people across the entire continent. Floc’h’s photography translates important scientific concerns—like climate change and the looming water crisis—into an overwhelming aesthetic experience, without sacrificing any urgency or insistence.

A monumental arrangement of Floc’h’s “water color” photographs constitutes a central element of the exhibition. Floc’h made each image by lowering the camera underwater to the same prescribed depths, repeating the process at different locations in the Mississippi and its source waters. Light passing through the water appears as an unbelievable range of colors and shades, influenced by factors like plant and animal life, mineral run-off, and other determinants of the river’s chemical content. NOMA’s presentation combines nearly 300 individual photographs into a monumental grid of vibrant color, a new kind of polychromatic map plotting the health of the Mississippi between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

In tandem with this wall of color, the exhibition includes compelling landscape photographs that illustrate the full span of the watershed, from Minnesota and the Dakotas, through Illinois, West Virginia, Missouri, Texas, and more. Floc’h traces the movement of water through the many tributaries that combine to make the Mississippi, chronicles human efforts to harness and direct the power of the river, and the alarming absence from dry reservoirs and creek beds. Floch’s striking landscapes are presented in tandem with water color photographs specific to that place, making a visual connection between what we can see happening on the land and the quality of the water that surrounds us.