Emmet Gowin: drawn into the landscape

Changing the Earth (Yale Press, 2002, UK, US) is a beautifully printed book, mostly about the patterns, traces and remnants we've left in the landscape. Abandoned towns, Nevadan missile-silos, open-cast mines, tank revetments in Kuwait, fields intensively farmed. Gowin finds these sites compelling:

the most recognizable feature was the ghost of a city, the old Hanford city site where approximately 30,000 people had lived and worked. It looked like it had been removed by a neutron bomb; nothing left but the ground plan and the sturdiest of a few buildings. [...] At the same moment, the sunlight on the grasses was so beautiful that I came home with an absolutely churned sense of conflict over how beautiful this landscape felt, while so undeniably terrible; how forgiving the sunlight is to all the things that have happened there. [...] I told myself that this is probably one of the most poisoned places in the world. How can it be beautiful? It was as if the light didn't care and the sun didn't think.

Adriel Heisey in the Whole Earth Review, Winter 2002:

Drawing from locations in the American West (notably the Nevada Test Site) and Midwest, as well as the Czech Republic, Japan, and Kuwait, Emmet Gowin's aerial photographs offer arresting visions of how we've changed the Earth for our needs: developing weapons, digging for metals, growing food, making power, The images grip with beauty and stun with evidence of injury, like lovely nudes of abuse victims. First the allure, then the recoil, and much later the dawning awareness of complicity.

Some of these photos are so grainy and textured that they look like Tapies paintings; others have the same dry, dusty, archival quality and distance as Michael Light's Full Moon book (possibly due to the quality of print in these two books?).

But many of these scenes look like unintentional drawings - marked out, etched, tattooed or embossed at a very large scale onto the land: see Off road traffic pattern along the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1988 (tracks of vehicles at speed like the drawings of a hand at speed) or Harvest traffic over agricultural pivot near Hermiston, Orgeon, 1991 (like entangled knitting, or the tunnels against the side of the glass in an antfarm).

See also:

• movements of horses in a snow-covered field
• For more rich large-format photography in a similar vein, see the mines, quarries and tailings in the work of Edward Burtynsky and in printed form, his Residual Landscapes, Studies of Industrial Transfiguration, 1991 and Manufactured Landscapes, 2003
• Junk for Code has Gowin at Mount St Helens and Martin Walch in Queenstown, Tasmania
• Gowin: Matera, Italy, 1980
• those aircraft graveyards, so large that an aerial photo looks like a herringbone pattern (Yann Arthus-Bertrand)