David Hanson's photos of the coal-mining town and landscape of Colstrip, Montana, are as sobering now as they were when John Szarkowski chose to exhibit them at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986. A native of Montana, Hanson set out to document the disturbing realities of one of the largest coal mining facilities in North America and the town that supports it — located just 100 miles from where he grew up.

Images from this well-known body of work have been exhibited widely since the MOMA show, but the original 66 photos have rarely been shown together. With this book, Hanson brings this work — plus 21 new images — into a permanent record. It is a devastating judgment on the havoc wreaked by man on the environment, and is as timely today as it was 25 years ago.

Hanson, of course, has much in common with the work of the New Topographics photographers whose landmark show preceded his own MOMA exhibition by a decade. Like those photographers, he is not preoccupied with romanticizing or idealizing nature - his focus is on the environment left behind by man's interaction with it.



The book opens with a series of strong aerial photographs — carefully composed images that track the coal mine's activities. What at first looks like a child's finger painting or primitive clay modeling on a canvas is actually the landscape. The images then move into a series of aerial frames that begin to show the actual plant, and the waste ponds that surround it — and the tracts of housing that snuggle right up to those contaminated ponds.





Gradually, Hanson brings our perspective down to earth, literally, with images of the houses built for workers, and the RV parks that also serve as housing — with the omnipresent factory, or huge power lines, towering above.

The absence of people is true to Hanson's vision and purposeful in its unsettling effect. He gives us no human presence to reassure us of some kind of life; instead he forces us into one bleak landscape after another, allowing nature to occasionally assert an untouched, though painful beauty, as with the partial rainbow that arches against dark, late afternoon clouds.

Next, Hanson tackles the plant itself, in its stark, eerie images that are ominous in their stillness. And finally, he pulls back again, back to aerials of the landscape that has been so wounded and the book crescendos with the images that have become among his best-known: a series of photos that look like acid-washed abstract paintings. These frames carry the anguished tension of Edvard Munch's The Scream, and stand alongside that great work as a cry against our horrific abuse of the world, begging for our wise stewardship instead of mindless greed. —Sara Terry