In 1980, more than 400,000 toxic waste sites existed across the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency declared 400 of these highly hazardous and in need of immediate attention. In just a few years, the number of these "Superfund" sites more than tripled. Though they constitute a shocking degradation of our landscape, Superfund sites are never seen by most Americans. In the course of one year (1985–86), David T. Hanson (born 1948) traveled to 45 states to make aerial photographs of 67 of them, documenting both US geography and its ravaging by industrial waste in one artistic odyssey. Hanson's Waste Land series, published here in its entirety for the first time, is a master photographer's meditation on the country's most dangerously polluted places. Each work in the series juxtaposes the artist's photograph with a modified topographic map and the EPA's own description of the site's history and hazards.

David T. Hanson: Waste Land

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Taverner Press

David T. Hanson is known for his studies of environmental disregard. He has photographed what we might regard as visual indifference, even devastation, on the surface of the inhabited landscape, and done so with purpose far beyond the simple documenting of suburban or industrial intrusion. There was an urgency to his record of a desecration. Ironically, he has photographed this subject exquisitely. His previous books Wilderness to Wasteland (2016), Colstrip, Montana (2010) a survey of strip-mining, and Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape (1997) offered the testimony of an unsparing eye. As a counterpoint to what can only be described as the toxic, he has now made an extraordinary document of sacred, cherished spaces, shrines, `resting places for the spirit¿, which transcend all religious divisions and suggest a universal point of focus. Under the title The Cloud of Unknowing, derived from the expression of a medieval Christian mystic, but equally applicable to the voice of a Buddhist seer, Hanson has redressed the imbalance of corrupted space with that of profound harmony. The photographs provide the exterior descriptions of sacred sites from Indian reservations, missionary churches, the temples of the modern world and the ancient, to suggest a contemplation at an interior level that transcends geography and survives in the most unexpected corners of contemporary life.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Diana L. Eck

David T. Hanson

David T. Hanson's photographs of the coal-mining town of Colstrip, Montana, and the ruined landscape around it were exhibited by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986. The work signaled a shift in American landscape photography, away from the cool modernism of the New Topographics. One of Hanson's aerial views of a waste pond looked like "a second-generation Abstract Expressionist canvas painted in acid," wrote New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg. The interaction of humans and their technology with nature is a subject that has been of particular interest to American artists and is inseparable from our shared heritage in the taming of the wilderness. The historian Leo Marx referred to this theme as "the machine in the garden." In Colstrip, Montana, the process is seen at its endpoint. The machine has ravaged, even consumed, the garden. The photographs reveal an entire pattern of terrain transformed by men to serve their needs. Individual images from the Colstrip series have been widely exhibited and published, but the entire sequence of 66 photographs have only rarely been seen. For this publication, Hanson has added 21 images and re-sequenced the series. Although the photographs were made in the early 1980s, they are perhaps even more relevant today, given growing concerns about energy production, environmental degradation and climate change. The pictures remain tragic reflections of a despoiled environment.

Colstrip, Montana

Bass, Rick

Hanson, David T.

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