David T. Hanson

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David T. Hanson (born January 28 1948) is an American photographer and visual artist, educator, and environmental activist. His work has primarily focused on his investigations of the American industrial and military landscape.

He taught at Rhode Island School of Design from 1983-2000. He now lives in Iowa.

Early life and education

David Taverner Hanson was born and raised in Billings, Montana. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he explored literature and discovered contemporary film, and graduated from Stanford University in 1970. While studying English literature and creative writing at Stanford, he became interested in photography. Although most fine art photography of the time was made in black & white, from the beginning Hanson has worked almost exclusively in color.

Pursuing his interest in photography, he studied in a year-long private workshop with the photographer and educator, Minor White and later worked as an assistant to the renowned photographer Frederick Sommer. From 1975-78 he taught photography and Visual Studies at Phillips Academy, followed by a year-long residency in Cassis, France on a Camargo Foundation Fellowship. He earned a Masters of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1983.

Work

1980s

Colstrip, Montana

While a graduate student at RISD, Hanson began an extended examination of Colstrip, Montana, site of one of the largest coal strip mines in the American West and its power plant and factory town. Over the next three years, he photographed the mine, industrial site, and company homes and trailer parks, including a series of aerial views of various aspects of the site. These aerial views quickly attracted national attention, being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York both in 1984 and in depth in 1986, featured in a 1986 solo exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, and published by Aperture among others in 1987. [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]

While working at Colstrip, he became especially interested in the aerial view, writing, “the aerial view increasingly seemed to me the most appropriate form of representation for the late twentieth-century landscape: an abstracted and distanced technological view of the earth, mirroring the military’s applications of aerial photography for surveillance and targeting.” The Colstrip series was the beginning of Hanson’s critical investigation of the late twentieth-century American landscape as it reflects our culture and how we live now.

As he was working on Colstrip, Montana (1982–85), he conceived a project that would begin to describe how much the United States (and particularly the West) had changed in the previous 150 years. Consequently, he widened his scope to include all of Montana and the High Plains, eventually encompassing the entire country in an examination of the American industrial and military landscape at the end of the twentieth century.

Minuteman Missile Sites

In 1984–85, Hanson created Minuteman Missile Sites, a series of aerial views of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silos and launch control facilities throughout Montana and the High Plains, with each site’s official military title and location incorporated into the print.

Waste Land

In 1985, Hanson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to create Waste Land (1985-86), traveling to 45 states in one year photographing Superfund hazardous waste sites throughout the United States. To make a richer and more conceptually engaging investigation of these sites, he developed a triptych structure for his Waste Land pieces, juxtaposing three different forms of representation for each place: a modified U.S. Geological Survey topographic map indicating the site within its surrounding environment, his aerial photograph, and a contemporaneous U.S. Environmental Protection Agency site description detailing the history of the site, its hazards, and the remedial action taken. The sociologist Andrew Ross wrote of this series, “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.”

1990s

"The Treasure State": Montana 1889 – 1989

Hanson subsequently made “The Treasure State”: Montana 1889–1989 (1991–93), an examination of industrial sites throughout Montana and their impact on imperiled species. Each of these photographs was framed behind glass etched with the Latin and common names of an imperiled species impacted by the site.

Known U.S. Nuclear Tests, 1945 – 1995

In 1990-1995, Hanson worked with a Montana saddle maker to create Known U.S. Nuclear Tests, 1945-1995, a series of hand tooled leather plaques commemorating 108 of the 1,054 known nuclear tests conducted by the United States. Each plaque in this series is etched with the military code name, date and location of a nuclear test. Forty-five of these pieces were featured in a gallery installation that Hanson created for Brown University’s Bell Gallery in 1996.

Mixed Media Installations

During the early to mid-1990s, Hanson created several mixed-media museum installations addressing U.S. nuclear tests, endangered species in North Carolina (100 Million a Day), and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (Targeted Terrain).

Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape (1997)

In 1997, Aperture published a mid-career retrospective of Hanson’s photographic work, Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape with original texts by Wendell Berry, Mark Dowie, Susan Griffin, William Kittredge, Peter Montague & Maria B. Pellerano, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Joyce Carol Oates concluded her 2016 essay on Hanson’s photographs, “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 David Hanson’s brilliance and audacity in transforming such incursions into works of art. . . . How far we have come from the romanticized wilderness of the nineteenth century, and from the stylized photographs of Ansel Adams! David Hanson is a worthy successor to such visionaries, in these portraits of cultural anomie and loss, the Luminist images of our time.”

2000s

The Cloud of Unknowing

After nearly twenty years of investigating the American industrial and military wasteland, and feeling like he had been working in a war zone, Hanson wanted to try to find what Wallace Stegner called “a geography of hope.” From 1998-2011 he created an extended series of photographs of a wide range of places of worship and sacred architecture throughout the United States, India and Nepal, eventually published in 2019 as The Cloud of Unknowing. The book’s editor Mark Holborn wrote in his foreword, “In creating this series, he traveled throughout the United States and made seven extended trips to India and Nepal. The photographs grant us access to sacred sites, shrines, “resting places for the spirit,” that transcend religious divisions and suggest a universal point of focus. From Indian reservations to missionary churches to the temples of the modern world and the ancient, Hanson’s work reveals a realm of contemplation that exceeds geography and survives in the most unexpected corners of contemporary life."

Monographs

Since 2010 four monographs of Hanson’s photographic work have been published: Colstrip, Montana (2010); Wilderness to Wasteland (2016); Waste Land (2018); and The Cloud of Unknowing (2019). In a review of Colstrip, Montana, Berkley Hudson, Editor of Visual Communication Quarterly, wrote, "If you could buy only a handful of photography books, I suggest this should be one of them. It is one to keep, to read, to study, to put in your school’s library, to put on your bookshelf and take down at that right moment to share with students and friends who care deeply about the dark beauty of photography. The book itself is an exquisite physical object, one that needs to be experienced in living, sooty color."

Recent work

In 2020, Hanson created a video on his Waste Land study of hazardous waste sites throughout the United States, with an original sound work by composer Jarrad Powell. The writer Wendell Berry wrote of Hanson’s Waste Land, "David Hanson’s art is here put forthrightly to the use of showing us what most of us, in fact, have not seen before, do not wish to see now, and yet must see if we are to save ourselves and our land from such work and such results. He has given us the topography of our open wounds."

In the Fall of 2021, eight of Hanson’s Waste Land triptychs and a large-screen projection piece are included in the Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, with the accompanying publication including an interview with Hanson.

Environmental activism

As a result of the catastrophic environmental devastation that he witnessed and photographed while creating his Waste Land series (1985-86), he became increasingly involved in helping to create more public awareness of these issues and working to support environmental legislation to deal with the problems. In the words of the science and art historian Jimena Canales, “We might even think of Hanson as the Erin Brockovich of the art world; indeed, his early activism predates hers by decades, as he has been consistently photographing subjects at the center of litigation and lawsuits seeking to curb what he describes as an “insidious form of social discrimination and environmental injustice.”

Initially he began working with Montana environmental organizations on issues related to the Colstrip mine and power plant. In 1990 and 1994, he gave public presentations in Miami on hazardous waste and Superfund sites, sponsored by the South Florida Water Management District and local environmental organizations. [20]        

In 1998, when Aperture published his monograph Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, he worked with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Mineral Policy Center in Washington, D.C. on a campaign for progressive environmental legislation. They gave a copy of his book to every member of Congress and arranged more than fifty individual meetings with key senators and representatives, presenting them with his book and discussing potential environmental legislation.

In 1998, in response to the controversial bankruptcy of the Pegasus Gold Mine in central Montana which he had photographed in 1991, Hanson worked with the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Mineral Policy Center on legislation to ban cyanide heap-leach mining in Montana. In November 1998, Montana voters overwhelmingly passed #I-137, banning cyanide process open-pit gold and silver mining. Montana remains the only state in the U.S. to prohibit cyanide heap-leach mining.

Beginning in 2011, Hanson worked with national and Montana environmental organizations on coal strip-mining, clean energy, and the blocking of proposed exports of Montana and Wyoming coal to China. He gave audio/visual presentations on his Colstrip series  at several town hall meetings in Seattle, Washington organized by Sierra Club Northwest to generate public awareness about the Colstrip plant (the largest utility in Washington was receiving one third of its power from Colstrip) and encourage the utility to retire the Colstrip plant and replace its power with clean renewable energy.

In 2016, these organizations celebrated the denial of permits for six deep coal export terminals in Washington and Oregon as well as the denial of mining permits in central Montana to supply those international exports.

In 2014 he began working with the Montana Environmental Information Center, Northern Plains Resource Council and Sierra Club Northwest on their media campaign concerning Colstrip’s leaking toxic ash impoundments in an effort to get Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality make the owners of the Colstrip plant clean up its leaking ash ponds.

In January, 2020 two of the four units of the Colstrip power plant (the second largest coal-fired generator west of the Mississippi) were permanently closed, with the remaining units scheduled to close in 2025. Hanson continues to work with the organizations to require the utility companies to clean up the enormous toxic waste left behind that has contaminated the underground water supplies.

Exhibitions

Source

• 1984: Color Photographs: Recent Acquisitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• 1985: Western Spaces, Aperture Foundation Burden Gallery, New York, New York (traveled)
• 1985: American Images: Photography 1945-1980, Barbican Art Gallery, London, England (traveled)
• 1986: New Photography 2, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (traveled)
• 1986: David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• 1987: David T. Hanson: Minuteman Missile Sites, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC
• 1988: David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana, Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, Montana
• 1988: David T. Hanson, Richard Misrach & John Pfahl, Gallery MIN, Tokyo, Japan
• 1988: Aerial Views of the Landscape, Gund Hall Gallery, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 1989: Fire! Sites: Defense, Deterrence, Bargaining Chips, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• 1989: Trouble In Paradise, MIT–List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (traveled)
• 1990: The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York
• 1990: Polemical Landscapes, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, California
• 1991: Tainted Prospects: Photographers and the Compromised Environment, Castellani Art Museum, Niagara University, Niagara Falls, New York (traveled)
• 1992: Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (traveled)
• 1992: Selections from the Permanent Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• 1993: Industrial Effects: Twentieth-Century Photographs from the Permanent Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• 1993: From Destruction to Reclamation: Art and the Environment in the Nineties, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• 1994: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Photography: Recent Acquisitions, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
• 1996: Critical Adjustments: David T. Hanson and Leone & Macdonald, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
• 1997: Landscape/Land Use, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, 1997 (traveled)
• 1997: Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California (traveled)
• 1998: Measure of Nature: Landscape Photographs from the Permanent Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• 2005: The Body At Risk, International Center of Photography, New York, New York
• 2005: Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate, Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan (traveled)
• 2008: Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
• 2009: Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (traveled)
• 2012: America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
• 2015: Photographing Places: The Photographers of Places Journal, 1987-2009, MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 2021: Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Awards

• 1978-1979: Camargo Foundation Residency, Cassis, France
• 1984: Artist's Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts
• 1985: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• 1986: Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
• 1990: Project Grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts
• 1994: Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Publications

• Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, texts by David T. Hanson, Wendell Berry, Mark Dowie, Susan Griffin, William Kittredge, Terry Tempest Williams, and Peter Montague & Maria B. Pellerano (Aperture, New York, 1997). ISBN 978-0893817268 Search this book on .
• Colstrip, Montana, essays by David T. Hanson and Rick Bass (Taverner Press, Fairfield, Iowa, 2010). ISBN 978-1935202202 Search this book on .
• Wilderness to Wasteland, texts by David T. Hanson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Miles Orvell (Taverner Press, Fairfield, Iowa, 2016). ISBN 978-0692493724 Search this book on .
• Waste Land, texts by David T. Hanson, Jimena Canales, and Wendell Berry (Taverner Press, Fairfield, Iowa, 2018). ISBN 978-0692046074 Search this book on .
• The Cloud of Unknowing, texts by David T. Hanson, Diana L. Eck, and Mark Holborn (Taverner Press, Fairfield, Iowa, 2019). ISBN 978-0692096703 Search this book on .

Selected anthologies

• American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers, Sally Eauclaire. [“David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana”]. New York: Abbeville, 1987. ISBN 978-0896596665 Search this book on .
• The Reenchantment of Art, Suzi Gablik. [“The Ecological Imperative: A New Cultural Coding”]. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991. ISBN 978-0500236192 Search this book on .
• Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, Merry A. Foresta et al. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art. 1992. ISBN 978-0826313645 Search this book on .
• Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, Sandra S. Phillips et al. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996. ISBN 978-0811814201 Search this book on .
• American Photography: A Century of Images, Vicki Goldberg and Robert Silberman. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999. ISBN 978-0811826228 Search this book on .
• The Body At Risk, Carol Squires. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0520247338 Search this book on .
• Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, Eva Respini. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009. ISBN 978-0870707490 Search this book on .
• Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction, Miles Orvell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. ISBN 978-0190491604 Search this book on .
• Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, Makeda Best et al. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2021. ISBN 978-0300260083 Search this book on .

References

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