Wasteland: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape

David T. Hanson will discuss photographic works from his monograph, Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, several of which are featured in the Brunnier exhibition, Imaging a Shattered Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate. Hanson’s photographs portray some of the hidden environmental hazards of the United States—chemical wastes, the exhausted land resulting from coal mining, and various other consequences of industrialization and militarization.

The Waste Land series is composed of triptychs, each work consisting of a geological survey map, an aerial photograph taken by Hanson, and a description of the site supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These works expose the most polluted places in the United States, sites first corrupted by industrialization, then neglected by legislators. Part of the Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination.