South Powerhouse, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010 by Joshua Dudley Greer

A few weeks ago we posted "A Word About the Judging Process" by HHS! Panelist Darius Himes. Having reviewed many entries to the competition over several years, he gave this piece of advice about what he looks for in a successful entry, "Give me 5 strong paragraphs all from the same story and I will start to get a sense of your craft and coherent artistic vision." Granted, this is the opinion of just one of our diverse group of panelists, but Darius' words have been jumbling around in my head since I read them.

Sometimes when I see a series of photos, I'm left grasping for more information; some writing to elucidate or underpin the work. But before I had even read the attached historical background, I feel like I knew the story behind Point Pleasant, a series by contender Joshua Dudley Greer.

I've never been to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, but looking at these photos, how could you not grasp the dried-up and deep rooted contamination? The images wordlessly tell me the story of this place.

Dead Deer, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010, by Joshua Dudley Greer

About the history of Point Pleasant, Joshua writes:

The West Virginia Ordnance Works (WVOW) was an explosives manufacturing facility constructed during World War II just outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Occupying 8,000 acres along the Ohio River, the WVOW was built specifically for the production and storage of trinitrotoluene (TNT). The site was officially declared surplus and closed in 1945, when much of the land was deeded to the state of West Virginia for the creation of the McClintic State Wildlife Management Area. In the early 1980's, EPA and state investigations revealed that the groundwater, soil and surface water of this area were heavily contaminated with TNT, trinitrobenzene, dinitrotoluene, arsenic, lead, beryllium and asbestos. The site was placed on the EPA's National Priority List in 1983 and extensive cleanup efforts began in 1991. While a large portion of the original facility has been remediated, many of the toxic and explosive contaminants were simply buried on site. The landscape that remains is a haunting place of beauty, mystery and violence.

Beyond the history, there are stories that I can draw from this landscape. One is a kind of ominous prediction: nothing can live here and maybe nothing ever will again. Gnarled tree branches reclaim a storage bunker. The ruins of a building are juxtaposed with the carcass of a deer. The elements of nature that have managed to survive are like zombies.

TNT Storage Igloo N7-E, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010 by Joshua Dudley Greer

My favorite progression in the series is a Becher-esque documentation of the "igloos" which were once used to store TNT and are now being subsumed by the landscape. On Joshua's website, you can click through bunkers photographed at the same angle and scale to witness different states of regress. Eventually the bunkers will become indistinguishable from the surrounding trees, but the regrown landscape is not lush, it's foreboding.

It's the photographs, not the text that give me me this feeling. But that was just one reason that I was reminded of what Darius wrote. Another is that, though Joshua's entry consisted of just images from Point Pleasant, I found many interesting yet unrelated (or only semi-related) bodies of work on Joshua's website. To create such a tight edit of a large series and to pick just one body of work out of many is no small feat. You can visit Joshua's website to view the Point Pleasant series in full and explore Joshua's other work.