David T. Hanson

David Hanson has examined the abandoned and still working coal strip mines near his hometown in Montana in work he calls “a document of a late stage in the exploration and development of the American continent.”

Hanson has completed several bodies of work that investigate the landscape as a reflection of our culture, both positively and negatively. The “Colstrip Montana” series documents the region where he grew up, which had the largest coal strip mine on this continent. The series of 66 images includes company houses, mines, the power plant, and ends with the aerial views, including this one. When his book, Wasteland: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, was published in 1997, he stated: “The aerial view increasingly seemed to be 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 application of aerial photography for surveillance and targeting.”