BY: ROB HOFFMAN
In the fall of 1985, photographer David T. Hanson drove across the American west, photographing the social landscape of a booming nation. Atomic City, an abandoned nuclear town in Idaho dating back to the ’50s, didn’t make the cut. Hanson had previously neglected to release these photographs, which he felt contrasted his visual narrative. However, after digging up the old photographs a few decades later he saw them in a new light. He realized they carried a unique significance, and decided to release them in a new book called Wilderness to Wasteland.
“It seems frightening yet strangely appropriate that the most enduring monuments the West will leave for future generations will not be Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza or the cathedral at Chartres, but rather the hazardous remains of our industry and technology.” Hanson tells me, making note of longevity of atomic products of nuclear fission like Iodine-129, which alone has a “half-life of 16 million years.”
“The temples of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations have survived a mere 500–2,000 years; Native American Anasazi cave dwellings and pictographs date back only 1,000–2,500 years. How much longer lasting—and how tragic in consequence—will be the contemporary wasteland that has been created in the United States during the past 200 years, and especially the past 50.” Hanson muses. “The radioactive contamination from American plutonium factories will be in evidence long after the Pyramids have disappeared, our soaring modern architectural edifices have crumbled, and entire cultures have risen and fallen.”
Fackrell’s Texaco Store & Bar, Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
Atomic City flanks the 890 square mile Idaho National Laboratory, a military base in the state’s high eastern desert, about an hour-and-a-half west of Idaho Falls. Until 1975, the site was called the “National Reactor Testing Station,” a slightly more ominous title foreshadowing the status of Atomic City today.
Established in 1949, the region is home to over 50 nuclear reactors, “more than in any other place on earth,” Hanson tells me. According to Slate, the site was also home to the world’s first power-supplying nuclear plant, which was established in 1951 under the name Experimental Breeder Reactor-1. The power plant has since been deactivated, following a1955 partial meltdown. According to Fast Codesign, this in combination with a few employee fatalities at a nearby plant killed the mood of Atomic City’s industrial boom and the population began to dwindle. “Their bodies were so highly contaminated with radiation that they were buried in lead coffins sealed in concrete.” Says Hanson. I imagine living in the vicinity of failing power plants is akin to perpetual microwave-phobia. Though the effects are not immediately obvious, or necessarily harmful, the idea of living in the proximity of nuclear waste never fails to elude the imagination.
View toward East Butte, Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
The city looks as if a nuclear blast obliterated the population at some point in the ’50s, leaving the region in an eternal ’50s funk of retro cars and stores advertising archaic services is once-modern fonts. According to Hanson, Atomic City is merely one of many desolate American cities and landscapes burdened with the byproducts of progress. “As I traveled throughout the U.S. making these photographs, I saw an entire landscape transformed by carelessness, greed, a utilitarian approach to nature and our environment (including the creation of “national sacrifice areas”—huge tracts of land, primarily in the West, that have been destroyed in the creation of greater wealth and weapons of mass destruction).”
Rising moon, Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
Hanson believes a day will come when the impact of American industry and negligent environmental practices will be realized for their sobering irreversibility. “Most of the major civilizations of the past destroyed themselves, at least in part, by the misuse of their natural environments. Perhaps we have reached that point in time when we must be held accountable for the enormous destruction that we have inflicted upon our natural world and our social communities.” Says Hanson. Should history repeat itself, and there’s evidence to believe it will, Hanson imagines a day when we’re forced to be “held accountable by nature.” Historically and statistically it’s naive to imagine technology as the destined remedy to environmental debt. Though radical shifts in historical patterns are not impossible, they’re certainly improbable for a society that has failed to learn from past incidences of civilizational collapse.
East edge of Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
The town currently has a population of 29, and Hanson claimed he didn’t see a single person the entire time he was in the city. “It was a difficult and sobering year, being constantly exposed to the stunning number of hazardous waste sites throughout the country and the extent of the damage that has been done.” He admits. Though Hanson took these photos in 1986, the city looks pretty much the same today: barren, deprived, proof of the insidious effects of industry. The rusted and barren homes give the town a haunting aesthetic, offering visitors a glimpse of post-apocalyptic America, pre-apocalypse.
Rising moon, Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
Off Main Street, Atomic City, Idaho, 1986
Photograph © 2016 David T. Hanson
Original images can be found here: tavernerpress.com
