Crude Awakening (15 photos)

Chicago-based Jane Fulton Alt photographed more than a dozen people drenched in an oil-like substance while standing on local beaches. "When I started to photograph, people would come up and ask if they could be involved," she says. "The pictures just flowed."

Fulton Alt worked temporarily as a clinical social worker in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and says she can't forget the wrenching photographs of oil-drenched birds.

"Living on the shores of Lake Michigan, I am acutely aware of the disastrous toll the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has taken on all forms of life, especially as our beaches opened to the 2010 swimming season. This environmental, social, and economic catastrophe highlights a much larger problem that has impacted untold suffering as we exploit the earth’s resources worldwide."

A photograph that shows an empty lifeguard chair with the sign, "No lifeguard on duty" is a metaphor for the dangers associated with deep-water drilling. "It means that no one is really guarding life," says Fulton Alt. "We're involved in risky oil drilling practices that threaten everybody and everything that is living."