The great tradition of American landscape art of the nineteenth century celebrated the transcendental, the sacred and the ineffable—a conjoining of the visual and the spiritual that focusses upon the perfection of nature exclusive of humanity. These include such visions of the North American continent as the Luminist paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, notably of the Hudson River Valley; the massive landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, both of the Hudson River Valley and of the American West; and the (lesser-known) photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan of the mountainous spaces of Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and New Mexico. In the twentieth century, the most acclaimed landscape photographer is Ansel Adams, whose beautifully precise, black-and-white photographs of the American West have acquired a mythic status: here is landscape not as mere scenery but as sacred vision. In Adams’s most famous photograph, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” we see earth and sky commingled into a timeless and seamless whole, irradiated by moonlight. The myth is that amid the visual splendors of transcendental nature there is no “refuse”—no devastation, no collapse, no erosion, no rot; no (seeming) effort, struggle, defeat, death. Which is to say, such transcendental visions of nature are not “natural” but “artificial”—they are distillations of what the eye sees and the brain chooses to select, to arrange formally as art, and to record. (And sell.)
Realism in all the arts was slow to evolve. The earliest drawings of presumably “primitive” humankind are fantastical figures, radically simple, mere line drawings on rock; the earliest tales are of deities, spirits, angels and demons, but not human beings in their/our singularities. It is as if the eye did not “see” what was before it, but only what the brain selected to “see”—abstracted images of an intricate reality, a kind of Platonism of the “real.” Not things but the forms of things, distilled and idealized. It required millennia before an even partial realism could be admitted into human consciousness, in “naturalistic” nineteenth-century art and literature in which ordinary, not heroic or exalted, human beings are depicted in domestic or intimate scenes. In photography, idealized images remained the norm well into the mid-century, from Alfred Stieglitz’s intimate nude portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe to the stylized dreamlike nudes of Edward Weston; a franker sort of realism, no less intimate, and dreamlike in its own way, is generated by the work of contemporaries Robert Mapplethorpe, Emmet Gowin, and Sally Mann in their contemplations of the human nude. (The most extreme refutation of the Romantic tradition of the nude is found in the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: a sort of autopsy on bodies still living, the painter’s brush a scalpel.)
“Wilderness to Wasteland,” David T. Hanson’s striking and disturbing sequence of landscape photographs, is most dramatically comprehended in the context of the history of American landscape art and of the evolution of the “real”: as Hanson suggests in his title, we have here an inexorable movement, a despoliation of Eden. His images are a rare combination of surpassing beauty and ugliness—if by “ugliness” we mean the ruin of nature and the poisoning of humankind. For here, juxtaposed with the traditionally celebrated contours of nature—mountains, hills, streams, valleys, grasslands, deserts, “big” skies—are slag heaps and waste dumps, abandoned mines, oil rigs, tanks, power lines, deforested forests, uranium mills, every kind of erosion and toxic landfill and Superfund site.
As in the classic photographs of Ansel Adams there are no human figures visible. When human habitations are introduced to these desolate scenes the effect is jarring and unsettling. Farmhouses, trailer homes—and where are their residents? It is ironic to learn from Hanson’s commentary that the mining site near Butte, Montana, once proudly proclaimed as “the richest hill on earth”—the second series of photographs in the volume—has been redefined as “the largest hazardous waste site in the United States.” Ironic, too, to learn that one of the open-pit mines appearing in a later section, and resembling a mandala from above, has become “the world’s largest toxic pond,” which would cost an estimated billion dollars to clean up, were such a cleanup even possible. Hanson’s aerial views exude a mythic air. Suddenly we are aloft, we are looking down, dispassionately, unjudging, not altogether sure what we are seeing: hazardous-waste remains, dried and discolored toxic ponds, scattered houses? Superfund sites in (lyrically named) Rancho Cordova, California; Perdido, Alabama; Leadville, Colorado; Times Beach, Missouri; New Brighton, Minnesota; The Dalles, Oregon. A harsh beauty to the “waste ponds” of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Site, as to the “Yankee Doodle tailings pond,” Montana Resource’s open-pit copper mine at the Silver Bow Creek/ Butte Area Superfund site.
Any landscape of Hanson’s at which we look, however initially attractive, will soon yield its terrible secret—one need only look more closely. Pastel skies and romantic reflections in placid-seeming bodies of water—“Providence Harbor at Sunset,” “Moonrise Over Narragansett Bay,” “Twilight Along Long Island Sound,” “Dusk on the Prairie”—such beautiful titles!—are, we realize, documents recording the presence of Texaco, Allied Chemical, Exxon, Standard Oil, the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant. We find ourselves in a world of dazzling nocturnal scenes that are in fact industrial hells. Lights are blurred as if undersea—or vision has become distorted. A cobalt-blue sky, eroded grassless earth. White-and-red striped smokestacks, perversely graceful; gigantic ghostly white tanks shimmering in reflecting water; an eerie equipoise in compositions in which industrial sites are reflected in (polluted, poisoned) waters. Gradually, human artifacts appear: a pickup truck, isolated vehicles in a parking lot amid a ghastly light.
The photographs in “Wilderness to Wasteland” reflect upon the quasi-Utopian dreams that American industrialism may have once embodied; in another set of heartrending photographs, one could imagine the human wreckage that is the consequence of industrial pillage and pollution. It is a perversity of art that, as art, what we see is likely to be apprehended in purely, or primarily, aesthetic terms. The less explicit, the less didactic, the less polemic—the more such art is likely to strike the eye memorably, and to linger in the mind like a visual riddle. Hanson’s work is a synthesis of two impulses: the wish to record, to educate, and to protest, and the wish to find an arresting sort of beauty in even these debased places. Walt Whitman, whose great subject was America, the spiritual essence of America, would have wept at these incursions into nature even as, one supposes, he would have honored Hanson’s audacity in transforming such incursions into works of art.