But so full is the world of calamity, that every source of pleasure is polluted, and every retirement of tranquility disturbed.
-Samuel Johnson, 1752

Conceived as a rallying cry against the ecological degradation of our world, Imaging a Shattering Earth explores the detrimental impact of humankind on our communal land. Aiming to engage viewers in a collective process of soul-searching, the project brings together fifty-six works by twelve North American artists whose photographs bear witness to an increasing sense of urgency.

Determined to expose a pattern of reckless environmental stewardship, these artists convey the big picture by means of imaging strategies designed to suggest a sense of remote space. Though each of the represented sites can be pinpointed on a map, the depicted terrain remains a kind of “every land.” Removed from the realm of domesticity, these works look beyond our individual rapport with the environment to foreground the impact of societal behaviours, industrial practices, corporate priorities, and governmental policies.

Taking their cue from the New Topographics landscape tradition that evolved in the 1970s, the photographers in Imaging a Shattering Earth reaffirm the primacy of the acculturated landscape as a timely subject of investigation, favouring industrial complexes, mining sites, dried-up lakes, landfills, waste ponds, and other exclusion zones. The selected artists (with the notable exception of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison) share a propensity for objectified representation that is predicated on a direct observation of the earth’s altered topography. Aspiring to produce enduring works of art that maintain a level of open-endedness, their photographs often incorporate references to the picturesque, the beautiful, the sublime, and the spiritual.

From toxic waste mismanagement and deforestation to the scarification inflicted by a plethora of mining activities, many of the photographs on display visualize the earth as deeply disturbed by human intervention and in need of healing. David T. Hanson’s Waste Land series (1985-86) amalgamates topographical maps, aerial views, and Environmental Protection Agency reports to draw attention to the worst toxic sites on US soil, many of which are situated in close proximity to densely populated areas. David Maisel’s inscrutable, highly saturated Lake Project photographs (2001-02) depict California’s Owens Lake, depleted in a mere 13 years to meet the freshwater needs of Los Angeles.

In windy conditions, toxic dust storms rise from the lake’s striking pink and blood-red residual waters, laden with traces of carcinogenic cadmium, chromium and arsenic. In Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s ongoing lament for the planet, a solitary male figure dressed in corporate attire attempts the Sisyphean task of restoring a post-apocalyptic landscape. Driven by a sense of urgency, this lone wanderer is a metaphoric surrogate for the other photographers in the show. He attempts by every conceivable means to salvage and rejuvenate what remains of the old world. Foremost among the forces driving the exploitation of natural resources is our insatiable hunger for energy. John Ganis documents the fruits of this hunger in his images of for-profit clear-cutting in US national forests and in Alaska Pipeline, North of Valdez, Alaska (2001), in which the aluminum-sheathed petroleum conduit invades the otherwise majestic frontier like abionic earthworm. In his Smoke pictures (1988-90), John Pfahl explores the paradoxical relationships between energy production, picturesque landscape, and the alluring forces of the sublime. Only the barest hint of materiality is retained among the billows of colourful smoke that engulf the pictorial space. Edward Burtynsky captures the awesomeness of monumental construction in his panorama of the Three Gorges Dam project in China, while hinting at the potentially cataclysmic repercussions of building the world’s largest hydro-electric dam. Further reflecting upon China’s wholesale exploitation of its natural resources are Burtynsky’s large-scale compositions depicting mountains of coal spreading as far as the eye can see. In the American West, mining activities have long attracted the attention of photographers. Peter Goin pictures Arizona’s mammoth Clifton-Morenci Pit, one of North America’s largest copper mines, and the abandoned Liberty Pit in Nevada as hybrid forms of landscape neither strictly natural, nor entirely manufactured. In Black Canyon (2002), Jonathan Long provides stupefying evidence that the apocalyptic wasteland envisioned by the ParkeHarrisons already exists in the heartland of America: Dantesque sweeps of abandoned coal mine waste in a devastated area of southern Illinois are captured by his swivelling panoramic camera. For these photographers, the short-sighted custodianship of our resources and the failure to account for the true costs of energy remain central issues of concern.

Nowhere is the tragedy of environmental disaster more palpable and irrevocable than in the exclusion zones proliferating around the globe. While the individuals, corporations, and governments implicated often act with impunity, the testimonies of the environmental photographers in Imaging a Shattering Earth help prevent the erasure of their actions from public consciousness. Mark Ruwedel traveled down the Columbia River on three occasions in the early 1990s to document the most contaminated exclusion zone in North America: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation nestled along the river in southeastern Washington. In the resulting body of work, Ruwedel brings out the profound dichotomies that now permeate this historical waterway. The Hanford Stretch appears to be a placid landscape surrounded by a wildlife refuge, an ecology reserve, and a habitat management area, but Ruwedel reveals these conservation efforts asa masquerade. Seen from the air in Emmet Gowin’s disconcertingly gorgeous representation of the Cartesian grid imprinted upon the poisoned riverside, Hanford looks as wondrous as the Nazca lines on the coastal plains of southern Peru. In his photographs of the highly contaminated Nevada Test Site, Gowin portrays the remnants of both atmospheric and underground nuclear explosions. Most striking are the subsidence craters created in seconds by thermo nuclear reactions. In Gowin’s lyrical compositions they assume a poignant symbolic dimension. David McMillan underscores the dialectic between the half-life of radioactivity and the ephemeral course of civilization in his expanding archive of images of the abandoned Ukrainian community of Chernobyl. Long after his elegiac portrayal of the once-thriving community has faded beyond recognition, Chernobyl’s exclusion zone will remain hopelessly contaminated.

McMillan’s work and the photographs of the other artists in this exhibition are forceful reminders of the growing danger we all face. Revealing a pattern of monolithic degradation, these works make visible the necessity of concerted actions against the “shattering” of the earth. As we contemplate this compelling evidence of human-induced ecological disaster, it may be wise to remember the fate of Icarus, who refused to obey the voice of reason.

Claude Baillargeon is Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan.

Text adapted from the exhibition catalogue Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate (Rochester, MI: Meadow Brook Art Gallery, College of Arts and Sciences, Oakland University; Toronto: CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival, 2005).

Curated by Claude Baillargeon