The coal region in eastern Pennsylvania is home to the largest deposit of anthracite coal in the Western Hemisphere. The coal industry boomed after the Civil War and was in decline by the 1950s, but more than half a century later, the reminders are still visible. Mountain-sized coal tailings in Old Forge provide terrain for ATVs but restrict nature from returning to the land above the mines. Photo by Travis Fox

EDITOR'S NOTE: As of March 2021, we are transitioning to a fully-digital News Photographer magazine after 75 glorious years of having a print magazine. I will be posting stories that would have appeared in print. Look forward to the regular features such as "The Image Deconstructed" by Ross Taylor, "Career & Life Balance" by Autumn Payne, Matt Pearl's "Doing it all, doing it well," book reviews by Stephen Wolgast (below) and much more. Thanks for your support! - Sue Morrow, editor, News Photographer

NEWS PHOTOGRAPHER | BOOK REVIEW

Travis Fox’s images chronicle bygone visions of future

By Stephen Wolgast

May 2021- An insurrection. A coup in Asia. And that global pandemic. Ready for 2022 yet?

Even journalists need a break from the calamities we cover day in, day out.

Travis Fox rises above it all. In his book “Remains to Be Seen,” what could be a science lesson in how industrial progress reshapes the Earth instead becomes an interpretation of landscapes once people have walked away from building what they expected to be the future.

The photographs are both familiar and inscrutable. With pictures made from a 2-by-4-foot drone with a maximum allowable altitude of 400 feet, you can sometimes see the scale in parking lot stripes and an occasional stand of trees. In many other photos, which offer no obvious structure or bit of nature to clue us in, Fox asks your imagination to fill in the blanks.

An image that appears at first glance to be a microscopic cell or the weirdly colored clouds of a distant planet is neither. But what is it?

Those bold stripes in secondary colors that abut gently shaped swishes in spectral tones: Are they a modern painter’s dreamscape that sold for $1 million at Christie’s? Or an oozing chemical spill?

A little more than a century ago, Owens Lake was a rich, deep blue body of water in the California desert. It dried up after 1913 when its source, the Owens River, was diverted to provide water for the growing city of Los Angeles. In the decades since, the dry lake bed has become the single biggest source of dust pollution in the United States, a mixture of carcinogens such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic. Beginning in the 1990s, courts forced the city of Los Angeles to mitigate the toxic dust, and thus began one of the biggest environmental projects in the United States. The project involves keeping the lake bed wet, and as water mixes with the minerals, it creates otherworldly colors. Photo by Travis Fox
For decades, Youngstown, Ohio, was an industrial powerhouse, producing materials for the American automobile industry. Youngstown Sheet and Tube’s Campbell Works plant was once among the largest steel mills in the world. The factory was closed in 1977, and 5,000 workers were laid off. “Black Monday,” as the closure was known, marked the beginning of large-scale closures in the steel industry, from Youngstown to Pittsburgh. Youngstown’s population has fallen by more than 60% from its peak in 1930. Photo by Travis Fox

What about the delicate white lines creating an intricate geometry set amid lush growth? It could be the solution to a math problem … or, on second thought, an abandoned roller coaster.

The visual puzzles lend enjoyment to Fox’s book, though the first time I looked through it, I was annoyed that the pictures had no captions. Turns out they appear after the last photo, like the solution to a crossword puzzle. You can find the answers once you’ve tried to solve the challenge yourself.

From above, the human geography of 20th-century America looks pretty, and often stunningly beautiful, as in the photos of the remains of the Salton Sea.

There’s a deeper lesson, too. Fox’s work reminds us that once we touch nature, we’ve altered it for decades to come.

Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.

To order: “Remains to Be Seen”
By Travis Fox
$45
Daylight, 2020

Travis Fox has been an NPPA member since his college days at the University of Missouri in the '90s. @travisfox on Instagram.

Don't miss more pictures below

The General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, produced some of the bestselling cars of the 1960s, including the Chevy Impala and the Pontiac Firebird. On a Monday in 2018, GM announced it would close the plant. Some dubbed it the modern “Black Monday,” referencing the closure of Youngstown Sheet and Tube a generation earlier. Photo by Travis Fox
In the 1960s, construction began on the Schuylkill Parkway in an effort to relieve traffic on newly built suburban highways nearby. The project was halted during the 1970s oil crisis and never completed. Photo by Travis Fox
California City is an ambitious planned city located 100 miles from Los Angeles. The project was created in 1965 with plans to become one of California’s biggest cities. It has largely failed in the decades since, leaving a mostly intact suburban street grid over 200 square miles in the Mojave Desert. Just 14,000 residents remain. Photo by Travis Fox
The 192-acre Linfield Industrial Park in Pennsylvania was home to dozens of manufacturing industries in its heyday. Its most famous tenant was the Kinsey Distillery, whose warehouse contained the world’s largest quantity of aging whiskeys, some 1 million barrels. Photo by Travis Fox
The Salton Sea was created by accident. In 1905, engineers accidentally diverted the Colorado River, and for two years, it filled one of the lowest places in America. The “sea” became a popular destination in the 1950s and ’60s — resorts were built, and tourists flocked to the site in the Southern California desert. That popularity was short-lived, though. Increased salinity of the water and the agricultural runoff that polluted the sea killed off half its fish, causing them to wash up on the shores. The resorts were shuttered, and most people left. Photo by Travis Fox
For more than a century, and throughout several name and owner changes, Geauga Lake, Ohio, was the site of an amusement park. The first ride arrived in 1889, and the water park — the last attraction to survive — was shuttered in 2007. The park, situated among Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown, faced falling attendance numbers and increasing debt. Photo by Travis Fox
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