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Photo Book Reviews

WasteLand by David T. Hanson (Aperture) David T. Hanson's Waste Land is a chronicle of the slow and gradual destruction of the damage we have imposed on our own country in the past 200 years. Article rating: 9.71

David T. Hanson spent the better part of fifteen years hanging out of airplanes snapping aerial shots with his cameras, documenting large-scale environmental damage the country has sustained over the past 200 years. He chose aerial photography when in the throes of his projects he found land access restricting, both because of government policies; and our inability to comprehend the scope of the damage from close range. The four terrifying series of photographs contained in his collection Waste Land reveal the intensity with which Hanson grappled for a way to communicate the horrors he saw.

Colstrip, Montana prefaces the collection, the same way it prefaced Hanson’s journey, from close range, on the ground. The intimate photos of the coal strip mine crisscrossing his hometown reveal the kind of scenery that makes people flinch when driving down a strange highway they spot something unnatural they don’t quite know how to define. The forlorn quality of cloned company trailers set on parched plots of land, red from a neon sign reflected in a loose patch of sludge, a cluster of solid clouds smudged with black dust; obscure a violence that has already happened, or foreshadow something worse yet to come. 

As the series progresses, Hanson ventures deeper into the facility and scrapes bare the sometimes eerily beautiful, apocalyptically tinted heart of one of the largest coal strip mines in North America. In one striking photograph of the coal based power plant, Waste Pond and Dredge, a freight boat floats on a neon green tinged body  of water.  On one side of the water is a wide channel of sludge. Beyond the water, four silos spew thick plumes of pink steam. From the ground another plume of steam shoots, blotting out half of the sky.

The photos in this series are all poignant, offering glimpses into the damage land sustains when tapping into coal reserves.  Yet it is not until Hanson takes to the air and offers a bird’s eye view of the landscape, that the photos become evidence, offering true perspective.

The photo marked Waste Pond highlights the characteristics of Hanson’s aerial pieces. In this piece murky green and yellow waste ponds appear to be pressing their nonsymmetrical shape out of the confines of the surrounding land. The land itself is marked with deep open triangular scars that appear to be etched or burned there. In the two corners skirting the scene are tiny pockets of trees that have remained their natural color. The scarred land seems to be pressing out the borders of these trees. Viewing the piece as a whole, from a great distance, one gets the impression that the land surrounding the mine will all be deformed eventually, that everything living will be rubbed out.

In this early series Hanson begins to define the body of work he collects from his vantage point in the sky. The choice frees him to truly cross borders he never could have crossed from the ground.

With his next series Minuteman Missile Sights, Hanson ups the ante, honing his aerial skills.

“As my work evolved the aerial view increasingly seemed to be the most appropriate form of representation for the late twentieth century landscape, offering a distanced technological view of the earth, mirroring the military’s application of aerial photography for surveillance and targeting,” Hanson writes in the introduction to Waste Land.

Hanson ups the ante on the subject matter as well. The sites contained in this series represent just a handful of over 1,000 Minuteman missile sites located throughout the Midwest in largely covert locations. Missiles contained in each of the silos in the photos have the potential to cause 100 times more damage than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The residual waste that comes from this missile production will linger in the atmosphere for more than 250,000 years.

The cloned framing of the sites parallels a frame in the scope of a gun. The abstracted view of the land beneath punctuated by things we can recognize—long white strips of runways, tall needle nosed silos,  a wide stretch of tarmac —give   the series  haunting  tension and leaves us with the feeling that we will never be able to fully articulate what we are seeing. This series epitomizes the accomplishment of Hanson’s work. He helps us to recognize places we will never understand.

Hanson found another benefit of aerial photography when working on the title series to this collection—Waste Land—self -preservation. The sixty-seven sites he selected from the United States Environmental Protection Agencies “Superfund” list—which details the 782 most hazardous waste sites in the country—would have exposed him to high doses of poison if he photographed them from the ground.

The sites Hanson selected were wide ranging, spanning both the variety of industrial waste and the geography of the country. From wood processing plants to nuclear weapons plants, from landfills to nerve gas disposal areas; Hanson provides us with the full roster of industrial waste lurking in the places we live.

For each of the sites in this series Hanson provides us with an aerial photograph, and a United States Geological Topographic map. He also includes an EPA text that tells—in bureaucratic double talk—the history of the sites and the threats they might pose to people and the environment. Reading these texts between the lines while viewing the aerial photographs evokes powerful emotions.

The case of Perdido, Alabama is a good example of the way this double talk can undermine the problem. Problems outlined in the EPA text are severely understated. The text states that benzene and other chemicals that spilled into the ground when a railroad derailed lead the state in 1982 to determine residents should not drink the water. By the time the photograph was taken, in 1985, the State had launched an investigation to determine the “full extent of cleanup required at the site.” The text makes it seem the contamination only affects the drinking water. Yet the photograph that accompanies the text shows the extent of more obvious damage. In it, a freight train runs on a strip of track like a blade down the center of a forest. On one side of the track, burnt brown trees bleed into a copse of seemingly healthy blue green trees. On the other side of the track, a line of burnt trees rim a vast patch of bone dry land littered with felled branches and pocked with bald spots. That half of the forest appears to have been devastated by some kind of environmental holocaust. The edge of the woods bleeds off the page, and leaves the viewer with the eerie sensation that the devastated half of the forest goes on without end. One can only imagine what other damage is left out of the text.

Other photographs show devastation that has been grossly disguised by government policy. The photo of the Rocky Mountain arsenal in Denver, Colorado shows a wasteland where mustard gas, nerve gas, chemical weapons, and pesticides have all been created and disposed of in the past. The site is still laced with contaminants posing serious health risks to humans. Yet in 1992, the area was designated “The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife refuge,” and is now a spot where tourists and schoolchildren are invited to tour for plants and animals native to Colorado.

For the final series, The Treasure State, Montana, Hanson returns to his home turf, and sculpts some of the most touching photographs in the collection. The series shows how the environment of Montana has been shaped by the changing economy. Each photograph is overlay with a glass plate stamped with the Latin and common name of an endangered species native to the region. The name cast on the photograph gives it a ghostlike effect, foreshadowing the potential of the species to disappear from the photograph altogether.

Oddly enough, these are some of the most hopeful photographs in the collection. Even the most fractured of these landscapes appear to have the potential to recover. The Koontenani River Valley, gapes from the clear cutting of timber that has taken its trees. The shadow of woodland caribou that graze there haunts the valley. Yet there is something in the way the sun casts light on the exposed mountain, in the minerals in the soil that still seem rich, that make you feel the trees will grow again, that the valley will survive.

The afterward that Hanson provides to the collection is not overly optimistic.

“There is considerable evidence that most of the major civilizations of the past destroyed themselves, at least in part, by the misuse of their natural environments. Our society appears to have little responsibility or consideration for what rare and precious gifts we have been entrusted with, and how we have squandered them. Perhaps we have reached that point in time when we must be held accountable for thee enormous destruction that we have inflicted upon our natural world and our social communities,“ he writes. 

Yet the viewer gets the feeling that Hanson’s view is not really so dismal, that his words are simply an invitation to incite us to action. There is something in the rage infused in each piece, in the thoroughness of his research, and especially in the beauty of the unspoiled parts of environments that provide backdrops for the photographs—that leads us to believe that there is a clear path we can take to begin to heal the land of the damage.

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