Time is the subject of Greta Pratt’s newest project, Jamestown Is Sinking; time, and water, and history, all of which ebb and flow through her pictures of Jamestown and the surrounding Tidewater region of Virginia.
It’s important to know that Jamestown was England’s first permanent overseas colony, implanted in what was then known as Tsenacommacah, the land of the Kiskiack, one of the many tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy. Only eleven years after the twelve-year-old girl Amonute — better known by her nickname, “Pocahontas” — supposedly saved John Smith, and thus the struggling project of English colonization, by shielding his body from execution, the first shipment of enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort aboard the ship White Lion. It was 1619, and the White Lion docked just a few miles downriver from Jamestown. Slavery and colonialism and founding myths: If one were forced to pick the place where U.S. history began, one could do worse than to choose the stretch of land from Jamestown to Point Comfort. But now, it’s all slipping beneath the waves. “Every day the land is sinking,” says Pratt. “The coast is eroding, the water is coming up.”
Pratt took the first photos of what would become Jamestown Is Sinking during the Covid lockdown, and they were, initially, a way to get out of the house and stay creative. “At first I just really enjoyed making portraits and seeing the water,” she says, and the photos are, in part, a document of what Tidewater life looked like in the early 2020s.
There’s the portrait of Rodney, clothed in a sea-foam green vest, feather cockily stuck in his cap, Kente-cloth mask over his mouth and nose, a smile or a squint wrinkling the corners of his eyes. For 30 years he has played a slave at Colonial Williamsburg’s living history museum, and on Juneteenth he posed in the doorway of a slave cabin for Pratt to make an image. There are the four photos Pratt made at local powwows put on by members of the Chickahominy, Nansemond, Nottoway, and Upper Mattaponi people, over whose ancestral land the name Tidewater now runs. There’s the stunningly abstract photo of the U.S. flag fluttering above a flooded lot, shot against patchy white vinyl siding, a marooned bike just off-center enough to lend an anxious note to the perfectly framed, flattened image. If you look closely, you can see the high-water line stained on post-and-lattice work, and if the waters have receded, they will be back — the flood can’t be fled. There are the brochures, carefully arranged on a wall ruined by damp, advertising tours of grand old plantations like Shirley (“Oldest in Virginia”) and Berkeley (“Most Historic”), trying their best to gloss the world that slavery built. Almost always there’s the water, creeping, reflecting, rising, waiting.