Everglades gathers Lisa Elmaleh’s sustained study of the South Florida wetlands, begun in 2008 in a landscape bound to her own regional history. Its subject is not simply Everglades National Park as scenery, but an ecological system defined by the slow southward movement of freshwater from Lake Okeechobee. Across 31 black-and-white photographs, the book considers a place whose apparent stillness conceals both biological abundance and profound alteration.

That alteration gives the work its historical and environmental weight. Agriculture, urban expansion, canals, pumps, floodgates, and retention ponds have redirected or contaminated the water on which the wetlands depend; more than half of the Everglades has been converted to urban or agricultural use. Elmaleh’s photographs arise from an effort to preserve something of a landscape being diminished before the consequences of its loss can be fully understood. The project therefore occupies a productive tension between close observation and the urgency of record.

Published by Zatara Press in 2016, the 64-page hardcover adopts a compact, square format of approximately 26 by 26 centimetres. Its green linen cover, bearing a woodcut image of the Florida landscape, establishes the book’s restrained visual character before the photographic sequence begins. Black and white further removes the wetlands from the familiar language of colourful nature imagery, directing attention instead toward form, water, vegetation, atmosphere, and the quieter evidence of ecological vulnerability.

For a collection concerned with landscape photography, environmental history, or sustained place-based practice, Everglades offers a notably coherent relationship between biography, fieldwork, subject, and book design. The publisher identifies this trade edition as an edition of 1,000 copies. Its collector relevance rests less on claims of scarcity than on the precision with which a specific photographic project has been shaped into book form: an extended encounter with a singular ecosystem at a moment when its engineered fragility had become impossible to ignore.