Jamie Robertson’s photographic study of the wetlands, soft heat, epitomizes Toni Morrison’s idea that water has perfect memory.[1] Robertson’s infrared film sits against a lime green backdrop, creating a transtemporal entanglement of swamp past and present. Her delicate renderings depict dense Southern swamps like Caddo Lake in Texas, Natchitoches in Louisiana, and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia.
The images are thermosensational, inviting viewers into balmy marshes invoking otherworldly realms. Blinding white and black displays of marshland and typical ideograms of various greens transform swampy banks into snow-like lightness. Within Robertson’s landscapes lies a contrast. The traditionally prescribed harshness of marshlands often depicted in archives from the white settler gaze, an attempt to tame and conquer, is replaced by defiant and visually retold stories.
In Osman in the Swamp (2024) a liberated, formerly enslaved person, stands amidst tangled undergrowth. In an archival image, he holds his gun, appearing watchful. Robertson reifies Osman’s steadfast militancy. The swamp’s hazy and humid tree canopies unfetter what her camera sees. Natural sites, abundant with materials aiding maroon survival, appear especially in the Great Dismal Swamp. Its tea-colored water is highly acidic due to tannins from juniper,
gum, and cypress trees, making it remarkably pure. Lush brush obscures sight, creating as the title of one photo suggests, A Place To Steal Oneself Away II (2024).
soft heat spans multiple modalities, haunting opacities evoke both ghostly apparitions and calmness. The foliage of trees leaves traces and blurs. Lines resembling solar flares in images like Spirited Away (2024) create a barely perceptible motion. This presence invites questions about what inhabits the landscape. If, as Glissant says, “Maroonage was an alliance between the hills and woods with a fellow in search of freedom,” then maybe the specter in Jamie’s images is that search for liberation – still unrealized.[2]
The Great Dismal Swamp is now only 113,000 acres across southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, just a fraction of its original size.[3] In Caddo Lake, picnic benches now appear to float among cypresses and wetlands, blurring the line between land and bog. Robertson’s Black Feminist hauntological analysis reveals how heavily regulated park infrastructure is currently disappearing, but the memory of once thriving Black freedom spaces
remains. Unrealized liberation is concrete in the series’ movement: leaves are soft and unfocused, bark pushes through the photo in textured, deep ridges. This disorder of memory runs rogue and untethered through the photos.[4]
Emitted light, solar scale, and spectrum are gateways into Robertson’s critique of Southern swamp misperceptions. Alligatorwatergreen (2024), a zine accompanying the show, features word clouds generated from an internet survey on swamp perceptions. The photographs form a historiography of the insurgent swamp, subverting, illuminating, and dissecting the ruling class’s ecological misrecognition.
soft heat adduces specter and spirit. Robertson’s images are surrealist. As she writes in her artist statement for the show, the work is a ‘poetic means of seeing beyond human sight,’ offering the possibility of knowing self as Black maroon ancestors did, inextricably bound to landscape and survival.
Soft Heat is on view at the Houston Center for Photography through April 12, 2026.
[1] Toni Morrison, “Untitled talk on writing and memory.” Talk given at the New York Public Library, New York, NY. 1986.
[2] Roberston describes the works as seen through an Eco-Womanist lens in her artist statement for soft heat, revealing what Glissant discusses with Patrick Chamoiseau in January 2008: the forest is both a resource and lifeline for the Maroons. Glissant, Edouard, Paulo Miyada, and Ana Roman, eds. 2026. The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant. N.p.: Center for Art, Research and Alliances.
[3] “Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, accessed April 6, 2026. https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great-dismal-swamp.
[4] “Hauntology,” The Department of Information, accessed April, 2026. https://www.departmentofinformation.org/hauntology/.
