‘Waste Land’ — 67 Superfund sites across 45 states

In 1980, the U.S. Environmental Projection Agency created the Superfund program to address the catastrophic problem of toxic waste sites. Studying some 400,000 contaminated sites throughout the country, the EPA identified 400 highly hazardous sites in dire shape that were wreaking ecological disaster on a poisoned landscape.

With the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, American photographer David T. Hanson traveled to 67 Superfund sites across 45 states that represented a cross section of industries whose practices have decimated the environment. Now, the full series has been published for the first time in Waste Land (Taverner Press, September 2018).

American artists have long documented the landscape as a space of freedom, heroism, and grandeur — but, as Hanson’s work reveals, things have radically changed. Over a year-long period, he visited nuclear weapons plants, nerve gas disposal areas, petrochemical complexes, water contamination sites, wood-processing plants, mines, smelters, landfills, and illicit dumps, creating a series of photographs that expose the transformation of the American landscape by our increasingly industrialized and militarized culture.

Hanson’s aerial photographs survey the scenes of industrial crimes, from waste ponds leaking into local streams and rivers to a dirt road in the woods that companies used for midnight dumping. In the words of sociologist Andrew Ross, “Hanson’s ‘Waste Land’ series is a “stunning documentary of a century of organized state terrorism against the North American land, its species, and its peoples.”

The sites in Hanson’s book are sequenced according to the EPA’s hazard ranking system. Each location is presented in a triptych format, with an aerial photograph by Hanson, a modified U.S. Geological Survey topographic map, and a contemporaneous U.S. Environmental Protection Agency site description detailing the site’s history and hazards, as well as the remedial action taken — or not, as some entries reveal the elaborate legal strategies used to avoid responsibility for both the contamination and the cleanup.

Born and raised in Montana, Hanson is one of the most critically acclaimed photographers of our time. When his photographs of Colstrip, Mont., a coal mining town, were first exhibited by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986, the work signaled a shift from the cool modernism of the new topographies and questioned the belief in a “triumphant march of civilization” across the U.S.