Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon well coats a beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana, early June 2010. A failed boom stretches through the toxic muck. Andy Levin

A month after the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform burned and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, Grand Isle, Louisiana was deluged with an orangish brown toxic mix of crude oil and dispersal agents sprayed into the spill in unprecedented volumes. The ‘hot zone’ is the designation for the area of the beach or wetlands that is covered with oil. It seems as if the entire Gulf of Mexico will soon be a hot zone. Andy Levin is a photographer, teacher, and editor living in New Orleans, Louisiana. A contributing photographer with Life Magazine in the 90’s, Levin moved to Louisiana a year before Hurricane Katrina from his native city of New York. A finalist for the Eugene Smith Prize in 2008, Levin is interested in the rights of the underclass, and the relationship between a changing environment and the economically challenged. Levin is the editor of the acclaimed internet photography journal 100eyes.

Catastrophe in the Gulf: The Hot Zone