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East Helena Smelter, East Helena, Montana, 1986 -
California Gulch, Leadville, Colorado, 1986 -
Atlas Asbestos Mine, Fresno County, California, 1985 -
Tooele Army Depot (North Area), Tooele, Utah, 1986 -
Pacific Hide & Fur Recycling Co., Pocatello, Idaho, 1986 -
Mather Air Force Base, Sacramento, California, 1985 -
Lincoln Park, Canon City, Colorado, 1986 -
American Lake Gardens, Tacoma, Washington, 1986 -
Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area, Silver Bow/Deer Lodge Counties, Montana, 1986
In 1985, photographer David T. Hanson turned his lens on certain American landscapes: 67 of the 400 Superfund sites — areas contaminated by toxic waste — considered “highly hazardous” by the Environmental Protection Agency. His series of aerial photographs, published in their entirety for the first time, comprise the book Waste Land. Hanson’s camera intensifies the 67 sites, which range from nuclear plants to asbestos mines, by filling the frame with their sprawling shapes, sludges and scattered mechanical structures. They look as if they could stretch endlessly past the photographs’ edges. In the book’s foreword, Wendell Berry urges us not to see the images as beautiful. “What we can see in these vandalized and perhaps irreparable landscapes,” Berry writes, “we are obliged to understand as symbolic of what we cannot see: the steady seeping of poison into our world and our bodies.”
Waste Land, By David T. Hanson
176 pages, hardcover: $50
Taverner Press, 2018
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Waste Land.
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