Open-Pit Mine Workings and Waste Dumps, Western North America, 1940s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Open-Pit Mine Workings and Waste Dumps, Western North America, 1940s — Archive & Atlas

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Open-Pit Mine Workings and Waste Dumps, Western North America, 1940s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1940–1949

AA-2026-44794A

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Somewhere in the interior mountain West, a hillside that was once a functioning landscape has been thoroughly reorganised by extraction. The pale dumps scattered across the slopes are the physical record of everything a mine decided was not ore — material moved twice at great expense to end up nowhere in particular. A graded dirt haul road curves through the foreground with the confident geometry of a road built by someone who expected heavy equipment to use it indefinitely, and a small cluster of company structures sits in the middle distance with the impermanence of buildings that were never meant to outlast the deposit. The 1940s were the last decade in which this kind of industrial landscape could be documented without anyone involved feeling obligated to call it anything other than progress. The warning sign at the road's edge is the only thing in the scene that knew enough to tell someone to stop.

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