Inside Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’

On August 24, 2023, Wayan Barre was watching the news in his New Orleans, Louisiana home, when he saw that a Marathon Refinery tank in Garyville, Louisiana had exploded. Having moved from France a couple of years before, the photographer had been making a series about the people of ​‘Cancer Alley’ – an approximately 85-mile corridor along the Mississippi River, in which Garyville is located – and he instantly got in his car.

“I was talking to this girl and her mother – she’s 13 years old and has respiratory issues – and behind them was the Marathon Refinery tank that exploded,” he recalls. ​“People were not even evacuated, and they were telling me that I should leave. I asked her: ​‘Why are you staying?’ and she said: ​‘What do you want me to do? Where should I go? I have nowhere to go.” 

Running between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Cancer Alley is dominated by petrochemical industry in the USA – producing a quarter of the USA’s petrochemical producs – with plants first appearing in the 1970s, and its nickname coined since the ​’80s. Producing chemicals and plastics from crude oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels, the area faces intense air pollution, with direct effects on the health of the people who live there. According to Keele University, the risk of cancer in the corridor is 95% higher than the rest of the country.

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It has also dramatically changed the local landscape. ​“Sugar plantations were spread across the Mississippi River, and the landscape is being completely replaced by gigantic petrochemical plants,” he says. ​“Louisiana is the swamp, the Bayou, with old trees and the landscape is unique. You see fields sprawled across the place, and then plants spitting smoke and flaring.”

Gas flaring, which Barre is referring to, is a common process used to burn off natural gas that comes out from the ground when drilling for oil. It leads to dramatic, tall flames rising above the horizon, as well as huge amounts of air and carbon pollution. A 2025 World Bank report found 389 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere by needless flaring.

Barre’s series and work shine a light on the corridor, and what life is like for the people who live in it. There’s stark landscapes that show the flaring and smoke created by the plants, alongside tender portraits made inside and around their homes. Barre became close with many, and stayed in contact with several people he met and photographed. He explains that several people in the shots have since died from cancer.

• Read next: A powerful portrait of Black American life in the South

Around 40% of the population are African American – 12% higher than the US average – and the photos show a striking clash between billion-dollar industries and poverty, as well as nature versus man. ​“Most of them stayed on the land where their ancestors were forced to work on the plantations and were living in slavery,” he says. ​“These communities don’t have access to high levels of education, and the plants usually hire from outside of these communities – you have engineers coming from Texas, for example, and local people rarely benefit from the industry.”

Jobs for local people when new, large-scale industrial projects are built are commonly promised by companies and industry boards. But as Barre found, the reality is usually far from what’s presented. It means that the communities in the area have been in steep decline. Though some people have stayed where they have grown up and called home for their whole lives, others have left in search of work and better air. Many have been bought out of homes, as the industry has expanded.

“When [a petrochemical company] wants to build a new plant where there are communities living, their goal is to buy out as many houses as possible, so they come with big cheques,” Barre explains. ​“Then you have a community that has lost maybe 50%, 60%, even 70% of its population. And then they buy out businesses, so in some areas there are no grocery stores, no restaurants, and no sense of community.”

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Yet despite the David versus Goliath situation, many do find ways to fight back, with local activists organising against what would have been one of the area’s biggest ever facilities, which they exposed to be on the site of slavery burial grounds. ​“One of the biggest projects that is going on right now is the Formosa Plastics facility, which is a $9.4 billion project made up of 14 separate plants – it was one of the scariest projects that the community has faced,” Barre explains. ​“They halted the project, and it’s on hold.”

Barre photographed a number of the activists, as they organised meetings, strategies and actions. And he found that the majority of the leaders were women. ​“A lot of people are fighting for for their right just to breathe normal air,” he continues. ​“And it’s abnormal that in one of the biggest nations economically in the world, people are still facing this. That’s what I learned, which is the paradox of this country: it has all the money and means in the world, and they are not even protecting their communities.”

For more of Wayan Barre’s work, visit his official website.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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