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A Review of “Colstrip, Montana”Berkley Hudson aa Missouri School of JournalismPublished online: 19 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Berkley Hudson (2012) A Review of “Colstrip, Montana”, Visual CommunicationQuarterly, 19:2, 118-128, DOI: 10.1080/15551393.2012.684306

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Visual Communication Quarterly 118 Volume 19 April—June 2012

From their vantage point inside and outside

Apollo 11, astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and

Collins in 1969 revealed a radically different

view of the planet earth—and its moon. For

40 years now, Landsat satellites have captured

images of earth that, the Wall Street Journal

reported, “look a lot like art.” Google Earth now

offers a mind-boggling array of viewpoints.

DDaavviidd TT.. HHaannssoonnColstrip, Montana

Photographs and essay by David T. Hanson. Afterword by Rick Bass.

200 pages with 87 color plates. Colstrip, Montana: Taverner Press • 2010

$55

Book Review editor : Erik Palmereapalmer@pdx.edu

Portland State University

Book Review and Portfolio:

Colstrip, Montana by David T. HansonReview by Berkley Hudson

Power plant and waste ponds, 1983.

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Pages 118–128 119 Visual Communication Quarterly

In his focused, intentional, and poetic way, pho-

tographer David T. Hanson has provided his own

haunting and exquisite perspective, and he has

done so with the eye of a documentary artist.

Beginning 30 years ago with a medium-format,

Plaubel Makina 67 camera containing Kodak

Professional Vericolor 120 mm color negative

film, Hanson flew through the Big Sky of his

beloved Montana. He made art from the pollu-

tion of the mining operations below. At the same

time, up close and on the ground with a tripod,

he documented a scarred, sacred landscape.

With Colstrip, Montana, Hanson offers an

extended meditation on a key aspect of his life’s

work—one that has been acknowledged as pho-

tographically exceptional. In 1986, photography

curator John Szarkowski exhibited Hanson’s

Montana pictures at the Museum of Modern Art

in New York. Later, critic Vicki Goldberg

described one of Hanson’s views of a waste pond

as “a second-generation Abstract Expressionist

canvas painted in acid.” She included it in her

list of the 100 most important images of the

twentieth century.

A portion of the images in Colstrip have been

exhibited and were published in Waste Land: Med-

itations on a Ravaged Landscape (Aperture, 1997),

but Hanson’s 2010 book includes 21 previously

unpublished photographs.

Colstrip, located in southeastern Montana, is

considered one of North America’s largest coal

strip mines. Rick Bass, in the book’s afterword,

writes, “An anthropologist in the future could

infer that it was here on history’s timeline that

our species went mad.”

Hanson’s photographs point us to look beyond

Montana, into earth mining and human practices

globally with energy resources. China, we are

View from First Baptist Church of Colstrip: company houses and power plant, 1984.

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Visual Communication Quarterly 120 Volume 19 April—June 2012

told, controls and produces 95 percent of the

world’s market of rare earth minerals yet has 37

percent of the known reserves. Rare earth miner-

als are mined and processed for computers, smart-

phones, smart bombs—samarium for missiles,

neodymium for Toyota Priuses. Controversy has

surrounded plans of a Malaysian refinery to

process rare earth ores transported there from

Australia. Nigeria has “blood” stores of diamonds

and oil. Angola: gold. Zambia, Peru, Mexico,

Chile, China, Australia, and Brazil: copper.

Untapped copper and gold reserves rest under the

Mongolian desert. In the United States, uranium

ore deposits surround the Grand Canyon of the

Southwest, and mountaintops above the secluded

hollows of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and

West Virginia contain coal. Beneath the surface of

Alberta, Canada: oil sands.

Photographers have long recorded the business

of such activities, where wilderness and humans

collide—“the machine in the garden,” as histo-

rian Leo Marx said. Lewis W. Hine, Walker

Evans, and Robert Capa documented mining. In

the 1860s, Carleton E. Watkins made mammoth

and compelling 18-inch-by-22-inch plate views of

California mines with their layered holes dug in

the earth.

Then, a century later, came David T. Hanson, at

the forefront of a late-twentieth-century burst of

photography that focused on environmental

degradation. He utilized aerial images in the

wake of the “cool modernism” of New

Topographics—the 1975 exhibit of nine photogra-

phers whose work itself was considered as a

rebellion against a “traditional” view of the land-

scape photography of Ansel Adams.

Waste ponds, 1984.

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Pages 118–128 121 Visual Communication Quarterly

Waves of other environmentally focused photog-

raphers on the ground and in the air—some

inspired by Hanson—have come into their own,

including Mitch Epstein, Emmet Gowin, David

Maisel, Edward Burtynsky, Michael Light, Mark

Ruwedel, Robert Dawson, Terry Evans, and

Richard Misrach. And Sebastião Salgado and

Alfredo Jaar have documented mining as well.

Indicative of the current state of such photogra-

phy was a 2011 show in Beijing, cocurated by

Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas. Coal �Ice documented the remarkable effects of global

climate change. Included were photographs by

Chinese photographer Geng Yunsheng who

began documenting the lives of impoverished

coal miners in 1995.

Hanson’s own interest in photographing mining

grew organically from his childhood in Montana.

Rick Bass tells it well:

David Hanson grew up only a hun-

dred miles from the town of Colstrip,

and when he was young he hiked the

rolling hills, sandstone buttes,

coulees, and sagebrush country that

had not yet been shoveled up and

hauled away or burned in sulfurous

plumes. Hanson left Montana to

study at Stanford, but before that he

spent a summer working the grave-

yard shift in a big oil refinery in

Billings, cleaning the smokestacks.

He stood on scaffolding inside the

huge chimneys, jackhammering

loose the black coke that had accu-

mulated there, clogging the chimneys

like arteries. It was hellish work.

Eventually, Hanson attended and then taught

photography at the Rhode Island School of

Strip mine, spoil piles, and intersected water table, 1985.

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Visual Communication Quarterly 122 Volume 19 April—June 2012

Design, where legends such as Harry Callahan

and Aaron Siskind were professors of photogra-

phy too. Hanson also studied his craft and art

with Minor White and Frederick Sommer.

Viewers and readers of Colstrip benefit considerably

from Hanson’s training and the vision that emerged

from it, a vision that Szarkowski said “describes,

without irony or exhortation, the current condition

of a fragment of the earth’s surface.”

When Szarkowski was organizing the 1986

exhibit at MoMA, he proposed to show only aer-

ial views, but Hanson persuaded him of the

importance of the combination of air and

ground views. Szarkowski noted, “Hanson offers

us not one set of facts, but two, one describing

. . . the circumstantial, indeterminate particular-

ity of temporary places; the other, made from the

air, showing the terrible beauty of an unfamiliar

and inhuman landscape. The two views chal-

lenge each other and the habit of mind that

allows us to equate a sharp photograph with the

truth.”

Hanson’s sharp photographs include an absorb-

ing, detailed accounting of house trailers,

churches, mobile homes, portable houses, mining

pits, waste ponds, parking lots, warehouses, cool-

ing towers, cranes, railroad tracks, big and small

trucks, smokestacks—all absent the people who

live, worship, ride, dig, haul, or work in and

around them.

In a foreword, “Notes on Colstrip,” Hanson

writes elegiacally about the formation of the nat-

ural world of Montana. But let writer Bass tell us

about the experience of driving 700 miles from

Bass’s northwest Montana home near the Cana-

dian border to see for the first time the place that

Hanson photographed on the other side of

Montana:

View from Power Road: Ash Street and company houses, 1984.

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Pages 118–128 123 Visual Communication Quarterly

I drove on, heading for Colstrip

through the blue dusk and into the

night. Every now and again, I

descended one of the hills into a lit-

tle velvet basin of pines and grass

where the lone light of a ranch

burned, but mostly there was only

darkness until I reached the town,

which was much more beautiful than

I had imagined. . . . The power plant

blinked, pulsed, and glowed like a

brain hard at work, or a dream illu-

minated in the night. It sat right in

the heart of Colstrip—beautiful yet

ominous, like an electric toad, black

as obsidian and laced with rows of

light. It could have been a set for the

Batman movie. A toxic citadel.

Reviewers have hailed Colstrip. The Christian

Science Monitor said: “Art, history, science, and

ethics come together.”

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.

Coal storage area and railroad tipple, 1984.

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Visual Communication Quarterly 124 Volume 19 April—June 2012

Berkley Hudson, associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, is editor in chief ofVisual Communication Quarterly. Correspondenceshould be sent to: hudsonb@missouri.edu

University of Missouri Discovery Fellow andphotographer Zachary Boesch contributed to thisreview.

All photographs © 2010 David T. Hanson. Originalphotographs in color. www.davidthanson.net

Abandoned strip mine and unreclaimed mine land, 1982.

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Pages 118–128 125 Visual Communication Quarterly

Waste ponds and evaporation ponds, 1984.

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Visual Communication Quarterly 126 Volume 19 April—June 2012

Mine spoil piles and intersected water table, 1984.

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Pages 118–128 127 Visual Communication Quarterly

Strip mine, power plant, and waste ponds, 1984.

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Unreclaimed mine land from the 1930s, 1984.

Visual Communication Quarterly 128 Volume 19 April—June 2012

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