Waste Land

Waste Land Synopsis

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.