Do you have any idea what you’re looking at in the image above? It might look completely abstract at first glance, but this is, in fact, an aerial photo. The white cobwebby-looking bits are bubbles, the green is algae and the straight lines are the edges of tanks.
This is the Kasslerfeld sewage-treatment plant in Duisburg, Germany, next to the Rhine river, which treats wastewater from nearby businesses and homes.
“This is part of my series which illustrates environmental damage in a creative way to engage viewers,” says photographer and environmental activist J Henry Fair.
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While wastewater plants help minimise human impact on rivers, Fair points out that they don’t remove all pollutants. For instance, they don’t filter out all microplastics. We all have microplastics in our bodies, Fair says, but the ramifications of that are not understood.
Fair has been using small aircraft to document the impact of human activity on the landscape, with the aerial view often revealing much that can’t be seen from the ground. The photograph above is one from a new exhibition at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, .
“I first photographed it in passing, then the curators became excited about it, so I went back to reshoot it. But then could not find it. So we flew all around Duisburg, and finally saw it as we were giving up the search,” said Fair.
Waste features in many of Fair’s photographs. The strange red landscape in the image below is made of the toxic mud left after aluminium is refined from bauxite in Gramercy, Louisiana. The two lines are vehicle tracks. The waste contains heavy metals such as lead and mercury, among other things.
Another alien-looking landscape in the image below is actually the waste treatment at a pulp mill in Ticonderoga, New York state. Trout in nearby Lake Chamberlaindangerous levels of dioxins as a result of historical pollution from factories including the original paper mill at Ticonderoga.
What looks like blood in the shot below is actually molten sulphur being added to large piles of solid yellow sulphur in Fort McMurray, Canada. The sulphur is a byproduct of the tar sands refining process and is stored on-site because there is little demand for it. Fair points out that the petrol (gasoline) made from tar sands results in much higher carbon emissions than that made from oil.
And does the image below show a peaceful Zen garden? No. This is actually earth from a lignite mine in Grefath, Germany. The earth is removed to reveal the lignite – a particularly dirty form of coal – around 100 metres down, and then transferred to areas where the coal has already been stripped.
Fair’s exhibition at the Bruce Museum runs until 7 February.
