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PUBLISHER
Taverner Press

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.75 x 9.75 in. / 200 pgs / 87 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2010 p. 70   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781935202202 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CDN $65.00 GBP £50.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
WORLD

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TAVERNER PRESS

David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana

Text by Rick Bass, David T. Hanson.

David T. Hanson: Colstrip, MontanaDavid T. Hanson's photographs of the coal-mining town of Colstrip, Montana, and the ruined landscape around it were exhibited by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986. The work signaled a shift in American landscape photography, away from the cool modernism of the New Topographics. One of Hanson's aerial views of a waste pond looked like "a second-generation Abstract Expressionist canvas painted in acid," wrote New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg. The interaction of humans and their technology with nature is a subject that has been of particular interest to American artists and is inseparable from our shared heritage in the taming of the wilderness. The historian Leo Marx referred to this theme as "the machine in the garden." In Colstrip, Montana, the process is seen at its endpoint. The machine has ravaged, even consumed, the garden. The photographs reveal an entire pattern of terrain transformed by men to serve their needs. Individual images from the Colstrip series have been widely exhibited and published, but the entire sequence of 66 photographs have only rarely been seen. For this publication, Hanson has added 21 images and re-sequenced the series. Although the photographs were made in the early 1980s, they are perhaps even more relevant today, given growing concerns about energy production, environmental degradation and climate change. The pictures remain tragic reflections of a despoiled environment.

Featured image is reproduced from David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana.

David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE BOOK
"Colstrip remains, strangely and disconcertingly, much like a classical nineteenth-century factory town. The power plant and stacks, with their clouds of steam and yellow-stained smoke, still tower over the town below. Nearly all the residences are in direct line of sight of the plant, with its flashing lights, constant drone of turbines and cooling towers, and intermittent, clearly audible sounds of loudspeakers broadcastings announcements and paging workers throughout the day and night. Dust from miles of exposed soil coal piles works its way into everything—trailers, houses, stores and cars. Swiveling draglines are visible, sirens warn of explosive detonations, and the reverberations of mine blasts shake the ground. Steel transmission towers and high-tension power lines dominate the sky, often directly above or in close proximity to houses and mobile homes. Surrounded on all sides by the power plant, industrial site, strip mines and waste ponds, the town of Colstrip is dwarfed by the industrial activity that spawned it."

David T. Hanson, excerpted from Colstrip, Montana.

DAVID T. HANSON MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS