David T. Hanson

For 30 years, David T. Hanson (born 1948) has made photographs that are widely celebrated for their powerful depictions of the American landscape and its dramatic transformation and despoilment by humans. His newest collection, Wilderness to Wasteland, presents four series of previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs from Hanson’s early work, made between 1982 and 1987. Atomic City documents the former nuclear boomtown in Idaho, site of the world’s first nuclear power plant and first reactor meltdown. The Richest Hill on Earth is a study of the vast copper mines, housing and surrounding wasteland of Butte, Montana. The eponymous series is a dynamic group of aerial and ground-view photographs of hazardous waste sites, while the final series, Twilight in the Wilderness, comprises spectacular night views of industrial sites for power production. Together, these photographs constitute a haunting meditation on a ravaged landscape.

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.