The State Bird in Oil: Charlie Riedel's "Brown Pelican, East Grand Terre" (2010)

On June 3, 2010, six weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel reached East Grand Terre Island off the Louisiana coast and found the birds. The frames he made that day are among the most reproduced environmental photographs of the century: a brown pelican on the sand, feathers welded flat under a coat of crude the color and consistency of melted chocolate, wings half-lifted in an attempt to open that the oil will not permit. In another frame a laughing gull sits so thoroughly encased that only its eye reads as an animal. The pictures ran worldwide the following morning and did something the aerial views of the slick had not managed in six weeks. They gave the spill a face that could suffer.

The context makes the image sharper than it first appears. The brown pelican is the Louisiana state bird, on the flag and the seal. It had been driven nearly to extinction in the state by DDT, was placed on the endangered species list in 1970, and had been formally removed from that list in November 2009, seven months before Riedel stood on that beach. The photograph is therefore not simply a picture of an oiled animal. It is a picture of a fifty-year conservation success being undone by a different industry, in a state whose economy, marshes, and politics have been organized around oil for a century. The bird is a state symbol, a regulatory achievement, and a casualty in one frame.

What the pictures could not show is nearly as important as what they did. Deepwater Horizon killed eleven workers when it exploded on April 20 and ran for eighty-seven days. Most of the harm was invisible to any camera: oil dispersed in deep water, benthic communities smothered, oyster grounds ruined, dolphins that would die of lung and adrenal disease years later, and a fishing economy whose losses arrived slowly in the form of foreclosed boats. The oiled pelican works as an image because vertebrate suffering is legible to us in a way that a dead reef or a collapsed larval cohort is not. That legibility is a gift to communicators and also a distortion, and the honest response is to use the picture while saying plainly that it is the smallest part of the accounting.

Then there is the question of how close Riedel got to stand there at all. Access to the Gulf was contested throughout the summer. Flight restrictions imposed in May required aircraft to seek permission to descend below three thousand feet, and photographers reported that permission was denied when the word "media" was used. Journalists described being turned back from beaches by BP contractors, local police, and in one instance an officer accompanied by a man identifying himself as Homeland Security. At the end of June the Coast Guard imposed a rule barring anyone from coming within sixty-five feet of response vessels or deployed boom, carrying a civil penalty of up to forty thousand dollars and, for willful violation, a Class D felony. Because much of the boom sat on or near the shoreline, the rule effectively closed the beaches to cameras. After sustained protest by the AP and other outlets, the national incident commander modified it for credentialed press two weeks later.

That fight is the second story inside this photograph, and it is the one that has aged into ongoing relevance. A corporate environmental disaster is also an information event, and the party responsible has an obvious interest in controlling which images exist. The pelican was taken in the narrow window between the oil reaching the shore and the perimeter closing around it. Environmental photojournalism is often discussed as a matter of aesthetics and ethics, of framing and dignity and manipulation, which it is. It is also, more prosaically, a matter of who owns the helicopter, who controls the road, and who can afford the lawyers when a photographer is arrested on a public beach.

The photographs did have consequences. Public fury sustained through that summer helped shape a settlement that ultimately obligated BP to pay roughly twenty billion dollars, the largest environmental settlement in American history, much of it earmarked for Gulf restoration. Fifteen years on, that restoration is real but incomplete, litigation continues, and researchers still measure the spill in the region's dolphin populations. The pelican, meanwhile, remains off the endangered list. The bird in Riedel's frame was one of about twenty rescued from that stretch of beach by state biologists, though the fate of any individual animal in these images is almost never known, which is its own quiet argument against reading a photograph as a story with an ending.

What the picture finally offers is a sentence that fits on the front page: this is what an oil economy costs, in a single body, in a single afternoon. That sentence is true. It is just not the whole invoice, and it is worth writing about the pelican in a way that says so.