Zoe Strauss wants to be your eyes and ears in the Gulf of Mexico.

She is embarking on a new and timely project to document the fallout (literally and figuratively) of the BP Gulf oil disaster in affected coastal states, and she is seeking your help to get there and do it right. From her project statement:

I want to go and document the waiting for landfall as well as the places where landfall has already been made. I think it's an important thing to document; BP has effectively tried to prevent journalists from documenting a lot of the oil spill. My interest is not necessarily in the documentation of cleanup, but in the kind of longer-range anxiety that will result from what's a long-term environmental disaster.

Untitled, 2010, from the project On the Beach by Zoe Strauss

Using an arts-funding platform called Project Site, Strauss is seeking donations for very specific and reasonable line item costs for the project: travel, accommodations, external hard drives, car rentals, food and, if she raises enough money, for the publication of a book of the project. The initial project request amount of $4000 has been met, but the project will be more thoroughly realized with a greater donation total (Strauss would have funds enough to remain on the Gulf Coast longer to create more work and a fuller narrative of the unfolding events and its impact on the residents there).

The title for the project, On the Beach, is taken from a 1950s post apocalyptic novel written by Nevil Shute. Strauss is in the Gulf now and her first images have been posted on her personal website.

We recently posted about ways in which artists are responding to the oil spill in their work. Zoe Strauss's On the Beach is a perfect marriage of artistic drive/vision and a pressing crisis that needs a reliable narrator. There are 23 days left to fund her project on the site; please take a moment to venture there and consider making a donation. Strauss is offering a series of perks at various donation levels, up to and including postcards, prints and copies of the forthcoming book.