J. Henry Fair takes beautiful images of hazardous wastelands. A consummate environmentalist he discovered that the best vantage points can often come about 1,000 feet above sites often guarded from view on the ground.
He has flown over toxic hog waste, streams of paper mill runoff, remains of hollowed out mountains, oil slicks over blue seas, coal ash disposal sites, a string of factories along the lower Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley....”
“To make an image that stops people it has to be something that tickles that beauty perception and makes people appreciate the aesthetics,” says Fair, who specialized in portraiture before taking to the skies.
"His goal is not to indict—he doesn’t identify the polluters by name—but to raise public awareness about the costs of our choices. Such advocacy groups as Greenpeace and Rainforest Alliance have used Fair’s work to advance their causes."
His book The Day After Tomorrow will be released soon.
"Fair’s images reveal the calamitous effects of our consumer culture’s insatiable appetite for natural resources. Forests are being wiped-out, water supplies polluted and/or drained, animals and humans are dying, but for what?"
Image taken at an aluminum smelting site
