Art review: A distanced view puts things in focus in ‘Industrial Scars’

Bottom line: A survey of environmental damage seen from the air in photographs that send a powerful message about the visible consequences of pollution.

A disturbing glimpse of the ravages of environmental pollution, “Industrial Scars: The Photography of J Henry Fair” at the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum offers a vision of a world rarely seen, but with great consequences for our own.

In small, seemingly inconsequential towns such as Canadys, S.C.; Wauchula, Fla., and Gramercy, La., aluminum production, coal-fired electrical facilities and the noxious business of producing phosphate fertilizer seep their toxins graphically into the earth. Photographer Fair shoots these locations from the air, offering the most dramatic view of the damage: wetlands where oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon laps against the coastline, landscapes so toxic with arsenic, lead, mercury and, in some cases, radioactivity that life appears to have disappeared entirely.

In other cases, flocks of birds coexist next to the damage, though it’s hard not to imagine the terrible consequences of such close proximity to such poisons.

In Fair’s landscapes, the earth is charred black, and foamy rivers of white coal ash and rusty rivulets flowing with pollutants eat into the earth. Where an X-ray would reveal the hidden secrets within the body, here it is the distanced, macro view that reveals the truth about what is happening on the ground. With a surface beauty undercut with real-life woe, the work is probably more profound for its message than its medium — its power is information.

In “Coal Slurry,” the kind of soapy flow you’d see seeping from a car wash winds like a white mist or demonic vapor through the landscape, a toxic residue of water and chemicals resulting from the process of washing coal in West Virginia. In a Mississippi wetland adjacent to an oil refinery, the suedelike texture of the green landscape is pocked with eruptions of blacklike ink spilled on a pristine tablecloth or a cancer eating away at healthy tissue.

These contaminated landscapes resemble nothing so much as strange planets with an unrecognizably cracked and ruined topography. But these are extraterrestrial realms of our own creation. In Fair’s hands, these landscapes become nearly abstract: Some of the images of the BP oil-contaminated Gulf of Mexico seen from far above have the appearance of marbled paper or the iridescent gradations of peacock feathers.

Fair implicates spectators in his images, primarily in his choice of titles.

In a grotesque landscape where factory farming has marred the land, an enormous lagoon of fecal waste from hogs striates the landscape with layers of white, brown and pink. Fair calls the image “Bacon” after its resemblance to that layered breakfast meat, and in wry acknowledgment of the end product of that foul process that winds up on our breakfast table.

And it is hard to see the image “Grey Matter” of phosphate waste pumped into the environment and not think about the possible health consequences to our own bodies, of this spreading scourge.

Though BP is a clear villain, mentioned with some frequency in “Industrial Scars,” photographer J Henry Fair also implicates us.

He envisions a human-made hell on Earth that supports our own, where things like electrical power, fertilizers, ham and gasoline originate. Fair mentions the word groundwater frequently enough for us to wonder about how these faraway places may impact our own. Containment is a folly; toxins leach out of their holding tanks and ponds by accident, design or the actions of water or wind, which disperse them into the landscape.

Other photographers have ventured into this territory. The celebrated large-format photographer Richard Misrach’s “Cancer Alley” series, recently seen at the High Museum, documents a portion of Louisiana ruined by environmental pollution from the petrochemical industry, and Edward Burtynsky documents industrial waste from mining or the electronics industry. Fair adds to that litany, often with less visually arresting but just as morally essential work.