POST-LANDFILL LANDSCAPES
«The Chicagoland area is experiencing a crisis in space. Refuge produced by residents in the city and surrounding areas has to be carted to increasingly distant locations for storage. The carbon footprint of our daily life concerns me, but even with what I hope is an increasingly conscious society, we are still often not directly faced with the implications of our actions. Does this render our actions inconsequential? Sometimes it seems like it.
With the awareness that one of my favorite places to go run through the woods was adjacent to a giant landfill, the highest elevation in the area that I live in, I decided to explore some more “dirty” spaces - spaces built on or around closed and capped landfills. It wasn’t hard to find many options of various sizes within the Chicagoland area. Because the land is often determined too contaminated to develop, but not to use, these places get converted to forest preserves and golf courses.
I often feel critical of suburbia and many of its implications, mainly the heavily consumerist mentality that I see it fostering, but I don’t photograph to criticize, only to explore, and maybe even try to figure out why I really criticize. Nothing really feels genuine out in the suburbs, save some of the people. These natural spaces that I so often retreat to are, to at least an extent, manufactured and sprouting from waste. In many of these images that look untouched I am standing in a parking lot, or there is a house behind me, or a highway. Sometimes you see hints of these, but I am not as often drawn to that. When I visit these places I feel as if I’m fooling myself, and as if the other visitors are fooling themselves. We all come here to experience nature but there is a complex and impure past to this land. The other side of that coin is that being in these places is still somewhat of a retreat, and even though they started their history includes our own physical waste, sometimes nature takes over and the line between a man-made space and a natural space becomes blurred. These spaces still, at times, fulfill that need to be away.»
© All copyright remains with photographer Peter Hoffman