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Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario. I was searching for an image of mill tailings. Burtynsky, of course, I thought when I found it. The photograph shows black, barren trees, thin and broken like toothpicks that appear to be poking through the surface of a gray swamp. Its tones are muted and monochromatic. Taken from a straight-on vantage, it’s along the lines of the “point and shoot” angle I would aim for when I used the cheap 35mm camera my grandparents gave me when I was young. I didn’t know anything about the place in the title, Elliot Lake. At first, I thought it was a picture of a ghost forest—a place where saltwater overtook freshwater and poisoned the trees to death. A bank of white land covers the horizon line, suspending the scene strangely in space, almost as if it’s floating, like a memory in which most of the background has been erased and only the important part—the trees—remains.

Seeing art by Edward Burtynsky usually begins with a feeling of uncertainty, at least for me. It’s not the reaction I expect from the Canadian photographer’s relatively staid subject of landscapes, but this is why he’s famous. His oversized photographs perform the environmental destruction caused by humans, to the point that their subjects are often unrecognizable, at first. A master of technique, he uses scale and perspective to astonishing ends, whether to make a three-foot-wide electric-orange river feel as wide as the Nile, or to shrink a man to a vague detail beneath a decaying container ship. He is probably best known for his work’s God’s-eye-view that flattens the landscape into abstraction: a set of geometric shapes that turn out to be farmland; patchwork patterns revealed to be drying riverbeds. In almost every case, he simultaneously shows us the details and the big picture. Oh, I see it now, I think, once my brain gets up to speed. The confusion resolves as I realize that the two can exist together in a single picture plane. 

Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario lacks most of the typical pizazz. It behaves more as a quiet one-act play than Burtynsky’s usual surround-sound blockbusters. As I continue to click and zoom in on the JPEG, there are hints that something isn’t quite right in the scene. Usually his pictures are very right: crisp and exacting in the level of detail, the compositions clean and organized. The details in this one are unusually minimal, to the point that I can’t discern where the mill tailings are in the scene. Are they the swamp? The bank of white behind the trees? The silent killer of everything in the picture? Unlike my experiences with other Burtynskys, the confusion doesn’t resolve.

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I started wondering about mill tailings when my father offhandedly mentioned how I’d been raised on a Superfund site. When he said this, it was 2017 and I was thirty-six years old. As with a lot of other things, I felt like he should have told me sooner. My husband, our six-month-old daughter S. and I had flown back to the Chicago suburbs so I could be in a wedding. A high school friend was getting married on a scenic farm near West Chicago, where we’d lived until I was eight. It was my first time returning to that area in ten years, maybe more. 

When we arrived at my father’s condo, I told him how the wedding was near the old farmhouse where we’d lived. He then mentioned how West Chicago had been declared a Superfund site around twenty years earlier. 

“The whole town?” I asked.

“I think so. The thorium from the old lighting factory was all over the place. Remember that park we used to go to? They had to dig that whole thing up.”

I was familiar with the term Superfund, but it sounded extreme to hear it used to describe somewhere I’d lived. I wondered what digging up the “whole thing” meant, exactly.

“It’s amazing the city finally got all of the waste taken away,” my dad went on. “The cleanup just finished recently.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention any of this? Is that why we moved?”

“Sort of. But they tested our yard when we were still there. They didn’t find any radioactivity. So, what were you guys thinking about for dinner?” He turned to his phone and started scrolling through dinner restaurants. 

The implication was clear—he didn’t think I needed to know anything else. I found this hard to believe. Parents are supposed to tell their kids about things like this, right? I hadn’t been a parent long, but it seemed like something I would tell S., at least when she’s old enough to understand. I thought this but didn’t say it. 

I had assumed the reason we didn’t go back to visit West Chicago after we moved was because my mother died unexpectedly from breast cancer about a year later, in 1992, when she was thirty-nine and I was nine. I thought that the memories of our time with her there might have made him too sad, or maybe he worried it would make my sister and me too sad to return. Naperville, the more affluent nearby suburb we moved to, was anchored by technology offices, retail, and a private college; its tidy, cookie-cutter subdivisions bore little resemblance to our old neighborhood. But I didn’t ever ask my father why we never went back to the places in West Chicago that I loved: the playground with the historic red caboose I climbed on; the hill we flung ourselves down on snow tubes; the creek-side farm where we searched for Easter eggs.

I also knew Superfund sites were routinely linked to cancer. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with my mother’s illness, or if it meant that I was more at risk of developing it, too. I didn’t want to judge my dad’s decisions from decades ago, but I also wanted to be prepared for my daughter’s future. It was hard to imagine he wouldn’t want the same, even at the expense of experiencing difficult memories.

John Mellencamp’s song “Jack and Diane” sounds like the West Chicago I remember: a farm, factory, and railroad town situated about thirty miles west of “real” Chicago. Its border was marked by a sign with the slogan: “Where history and progress meet.” We lived in a gray former farmhouse that resided on a thoroughfare between the town’s main destinations—the library and the Tastee-Freez in one direction, my elementary school and a large public park in the other. Our house was built in 1880. I knew this because the date was hand-painted across the white plaque from the historical society that my parents had mounted to our front porch.

Fruit trees filled the acre of yard that surrounded our house. My parents spent most of the fall months raking apples and pears. They told me to stay away from the mulberry tree in the summer, but I couldn’t resist sheltering beneath its canopy of long, drapey branches; the purple spots that bled across my white canvas shoes always gave me away. My father made pies using cherries from a springy little tree that lived beside our laundry line. My peony-pink room on the farmhouse’s second floor overlooked a walnut tree, where a yellow rope tethered a plastic swing to a branch.

Though they complained about the farmhouse’s relentless creaks and the hours it took to mow the lawn, my parents held a romantic fondness for it, as most couples do for their first home. My father was always reserved in his expressions of affection, but I knew, if nothing else, he loved those fruit trees. When they decided we needed to move, he—a copywriter for a Chicago advertising firm—came up with a slogan to capture his single preference: No trees, no thanks.

Returning in 2017, after living across the country in Seattle for over a decade and with my own daughter in the back seat, this place of my youngest years felt more rural than I remembered, in its mixture of stark strip malls and patches of corn fields. One afternoon, during a pause between wedding activities, we drove aimlessly while S. napped in the car. Something about the ways the cross streets lined up fluttered in my mind, a dim flash from somewhere long buried. The town sign appeared, its words the same: “Where history and progress meet.”

I pulled up to the two-story farmhouse. Its pointed roof and wide front porch appeared mostly as they had the day we moved out. The plaque from the historical society still hung next to the screen door. I recognized our stout red mailbox beside it, now caked in rust. The worn AstroTurf peeled up along the edges of the front stairway. I imagined the groaning chains of the wooden bench swing we’d left hanging on the porch and wondered if the people behind the darkened windows ever used it. 

But one thing had changed: all the trees were gone—the cherry, the mulberry, the apples and pears. The only evidence of the house’s history as a farm were the scars of stumps that disrupted the otherwise flat, green yard. I heard my dad’s slogan in my mind: No trees, no thanks. I wondered why anyone would cut them all down.

“I used to live there.” I whispered, trying not to wake S.

“There?” My husband looked up from his phone, his eyebrows slightly furrowed. The surprise in his voice implied how much I only ever spoke about my childhood in relation to Naperville and its subdivisions of colonial-style houses surrounded by baby trees that were barely older than me. It occurred to me then how little this house resembled the place I’d always thought of myself as being from, as if that earlier part of my life didn’t exist.

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I’d always been drawn to Burtynsky’s work for the way it captures the present. When I’d first seen his photos in an exhibition in Canada in the early 2000s, it felt prescient, like he could show us climate change (back then, a phenomenon famously hard to see). Some years later, I wrote a magazine feature on his Anthropocene series, which I saw as fully grounded in that same angle: Look at what we’re doing, right now. I didn’t think much about his work’s relationship with the past. 

But, while researching that article, I kept reading about how he was influenced by Carleton Watkins, an artist who took large-format landscape photographs of the Western US in the nineteenth century. Watkins’s photos were so astoundingly large in their time that they were called “mammoth plates”—images created using an oversized camera and glass plate negative process that required bringing two thousand pounds of equipment into the field. The labor was worth it. Watkins’s overhead landscape shots were breathtaking in their detailed, wide-spanning perspectives—far and away the largest and most spectacular photographs ever taken of Yosemite and Mariposa Grove at the time. 

Watkins wasn’t necessarily following an environmental agenda in his creations; his works were used by miners who were promoting the scale of their businesses, as well as lawyers trying to prove environmental harm. Like Burtynsky, he also captured landscapes with human interventions, such as tiny railways threaded around mountain bases and the jagged, geometric silhouettes of excavated mines—shapes and scales that I can find inside of Burtynsky’s photos now. Still, one well-known story goes that Watkins’s images influenced Lincoln’s decision to sign legislation to preserve Yosemite, in what became a prototype for the National Park System. The anecdote implies that the images shaped Lincoln’s viewpoint of those lands. As if they created a kind of portal into the future and the threats it would pose. 

Burtynsky often talks about how he saw Watkins’s landscapes in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, around the time his own career was taking off. Did Watkins’s work teach Burtynsky how to do something similar within his photographs—what details to excavate and frame to make people see beyond the present? How to manipulate shapes from past landscapes to force a new perspective on the contemporary world? As someone who works in a museum, I like to imagine this—that the objects we have on the wall can instigate unexpected ways of seeing.

But, it’s one thing to confront the future through a scene of the past or present that is cloaked in beauty, especially if doing so involves a photograph taken in a remote place you’ve never been. It’s another to look at a more personal piece of the past—one that’s wrenching—and to want to keep looking. I can see why my father wouldn’t confront our past lives in West Chicago. He wouldn’t want to see the yard he and my mother once tended, now without trees, after everything that happened. 

I once read about a phenomenon that’s stayed with me called Cassandra’s Regret, named after the daughter of the king of Troy, who foresaw the ancient city’s fall, her father’s death, her own murder, and even the hour of her death. The implication is Cassandra wished she hadn’t seen the future since she couldn’t change it. Scientists Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocio Garcia-Retamero borrowed the term for a 2017 study, when they asked adults how much they wanted to know about the future. Around ninety percent of the participants said they wouldn’t want to know about upcoming negative events; at least half said they preferred to remain ignorant of even positive events. Only one percent consistently wanted to know about important future events, good or bad. They also found that adults over age fifty are less willing to know their futures than those under the age of thirty-five.

My father isn’t as interested in visual art as I am, but I can imagine bringing him to a Burtynsky exhibition. I can see him being drawn to the images I championed in my article—the aestheticized destruction. But not to Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario. “Too sad,” I imagine him saying, were he to stand in front of its stark trees, though whether he’d see this image as a painful past or a terrifying potential future, I don’t know.

In some ways, I think I’m more like Burtynsky than I am like my father; I want to look at those photographs, even when I find the experience to be devastating. Burtynsky’s own dad died of cancer at age forty-six, after working at a GM factory where he was exposed to carcinogenic chemicals. Burtynsky was a few years older than I was when my mother died, but I imagine our similarities when I experience the perspectives of his photographs. I picture the person behind the camera as someone like me. I see a kid whose past willful ignorance of future catastrophe—of the possibility that parents die when you’re nine years old—didn’t prepare him for that reality. I see a parallel between his hyper-detailed photos with my own hyperfixation on details: as a kind of information gathering, to prepare for the worst possible future. An addiction that is particularly satisfying for a kid who doesn’t want to be ignorant of events to come ever again.

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When we returned to Seattle from our trip, I turned to Google with my questions. I wanted the details—any I could find. I learned that Lindsay Light Company, a major manufacturer of gaslight mantles (early precursors to streetlights), moved their factory to West Chicago in the 1930s. Lindsay Light used the radioactive element thorium nitrate to manufacture their mantles. At the factory, workers also extracted radium and uranium for the atomic bomb being developed nearby, at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi was working on the Manhattan Project. 

Extracting thorium leaves behind the sand-like, radioactive waste known as mill tailings. The scale of mill tailings that permeated West Chicago is hard to fully comprehend, or maybe just to believe. The factory, just short of a mile from my house, stored the radioactive waste on site, in a pile that grew over decades. Lindsay Light also stored liquid waste in stagnant ponds, which, over the years, overflowed into a storm sewer and entered a local creek that connects to the region’s DuPage River. When the factory ran out of space, they started storing mill tailings at the park where I used to snowtube, fencing off the radioactive area with barbed wire. They also offered mill tailings to the town as free fertilizer and fill in the 1940s and ’50s; many residents took them up on it, as did the West Chicago Waste Treatment Plant, ensuring the radioactivity spread well beyond the factory. By the time my parents moved to West Chicago in the late 1970s, the tailings were everywhere, and the pile of waste on the factory grounds reached four stories high; locals nicknamed it Mount Thorium—a mountain symbolic not of beauty but of devastation. I scoured the internet trying to see what it looked like but never could find a photograph. And so began the search for an image of mill tailings that led me back to Burtynsky’s work.

Among all the articles I read, the only photo that seemed to emblematize West Chicago’s mill tailings was a chain link fence, with a “Warning: Keep Out” sign hung in the center. The more lasting images were the memories that the locals described, most of them as adults, decades after they’d experienced them. I read stories in the Chicago Reader and LA Times about people who found lumpy, deformed carp and duck eggs without shells when they were kids; treetops in their yards that were mysteriously charred overnight; windowpanes that magically turned blue; skin tinted purple after playing in the local creek. 

When thorium is inhaled as dust, some of it can remain in the lungs for long periods of time. When it is ingested, a small amount can enter the bloodstream and bones, where it may stay for years. In the articles I read, most of the people the reporters spoke with also had some link to cancer, either themselves or through close family members. The stories also cited studies that found significantly increased cancer rates among West Chicago residents, including one from 1991 (the year before my mother died) that showed elevated incidents of melanoma, lung, colorectal, and breast cancers. As I pored through the stories, I knew my mother probably wasn’t part of the statistics since my father hadn’t stayed connected to the town after we left. That realization made her experience seem invisible—a death that might have meant something more if it was part of this larger story that could prevent the same thing from happening to other people. Still, I wanted these details. I could jigsaw them together into some kind of understanding of the past. I envied the way the people featured in the articles turned their memory scraps into warning signs for the future by talking to the journalists, whether they wanted to think about their childhoods that way or not.

The corporation determined the factory wasn’t profitable enough to operate under new environmental rules put forth by the EPA in 1973; they shut it down and paved over the pile of radioactive debris with a skin of soil and asphalt. The testing for radioactivity in our yard that my father remembered must have happened in response to those EPA regulations—long before any formal acknowledgement from the factory of the damage the factory reaped on the people living nearby. In 1997, several years after we moved to Naperville, West Chicago residents filed a class-action lawsuit, which led to a settlement and eventually the federal Superfund cleanup that lasted until 2015. The state now oversees the cleanup which is slated to be completed by 2026. I knew three of the official Superfund sites well—the park where I used to sled and swim, the creek where we hunted for Easter eggs, and nearly 700 nearby houses. I have no memory of the factory itself. That area remains as a fenced-off, otherwise ordinary open field. But the ground water beneath the grass is still contaminated. Maybe that’s why the new owners of our house cut down all the fruit trees: they wouldn’t have to look at them and worry anymore. 

The amount of time this has been going on—my lifetime, literally—makes me skeptical that it will ever actually be complete, that West Chicago will ever be able to move on from the history. But, this strikes me as the more honest ending. To have the past eternally visible in West Chicago’s present. To always be aware of the thorium, in a way that informs all of our decision-making going forward. 

At some point in my search, it also occurred to me to look up Elliot Lake. It turned out to be a rural town in southeastern Ontario once known as the “uranium capital of the world,” because of the mines excavated there from the 1950s through the 1990s. The trees in Burtynsky’s image were in a mill tailings pond that had been poisoned by waste from the mines. Mill tailings were used as fill throughout Elliot Lake, too. Its residents still have radioactive yards; I read about three retired women who recently lost a lawsuit to have the waste removed from properties they purchased without knowing of the radioactivity. One of them talks about how she can’t let her grandchildren play in the yard. These women sound like how I feel. In some ways, it was the same story as West Chicago, which made the scale of the problem suddenly feel so much larger, as if it’s quietly happening everywhere.

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“Attention without feeling, I begin to learn, is only a report.” Artforum critic Stephen Failey referenced this quote from Mary Oliver in a recent review of Burtynsky’s work. In 2025, the International Center of Photography in New York presented Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration, an exhibit of eighty photographs the artist took over the past forty years. I didn’t see the show, but all the reviews I read sounded disappointed at best. The reasons varied: too much spectacle, too little intimacy, too much ruin porn, to name a few—all problems that link back to the “God’s eye view,” as if that vantage is no longer prescient. One critic likened Burtynsky’s work to corporate lobby photography, another to National Geographic. To date, I don’t think any of Burtynsky’s photography has led to a National Park, or whatever the equivalent might be to Watkins’s prodding of Lincoln, if that story is even true.

The resonance of Burtynsky’s photographs may have changed because the future they once showed us has arrived. It’s not difficult to picture climate change anymore. Dozens of overhead images taken by photojournalists instantly come to mind: Maui’s coastline charred gray. Apocalyptic fires raging beside a stream of highway traffic in Los Angeles. Brown floodwaters breaching the levees twenty minutes south of my Seattle home, smearing a place I know into a softer, more painterly landscape. Emotionally speaking, reality looks like a Burtynsky photograph now.

I tried to get my own God’s eye view over the years, at least on a personal level. Some people call genetic testing “playing God,” after all. I took an at-home BRCA test, which screens two genes for changes that increase your risk for breast cancer; it came back negative. But this was dissatisfying; I still could get cancer another way. And so, I became a patient at a university’s breast clinic. I started getting mammograms when I was in my thirties. Now I’m getting MRI screenings, too. Everything has been negative. I’ve passed my mother’s age at the time of her death, and my daughter is now eight—nearly as old as I was when my mom died. My future is here, too. Which perhaps is also why all these details that I get from the tests and the screenings and the clinic’s statistics on me seem so insufficient; the relief is brief when the answers come in. 

And, the details of West Chicago still haunt me. I finally found an image of Mount Thorium a few weeks ago. It was in A Lifetime Irradiated, a documentary made by Erika Bartlett, a former West Chicago resident who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012. She decided to interview people who lived near her former home, as a “way to feel better” after her diagnosis, she explains in the film. She found that nearly every West Chicago door she knocked on led to a story of cancer. She sourced archival footage I’d never seen before but that looked like film reels from my memories. One segment showed the local parade that went down our street, where the community thorium activists drove a float in protest of the factory’s waste storage, passing by what looked like my next-door neighbor’s house in the background. Other shots captured the park and the sled hill and the old caboose I used to climb on. And one briefly showed the four-story mound of mill tailings: a long, low bank against a gray skyline, flat across the top and covered in white tarp, looming behind a row of single-story houses. 

Now that I’ve been looking at Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario for so long, I see similarities in the way the silhouette and the palette of the thorium mound echo Burtynsky’s photograph. I wondered if I had seen Mount Thorium when I was young. If the past image was still present inside of my mind enough to recognize its shape inside of Burtynsky’s photograph without consciously remembering it. 

When the critic Tyler Green explains the success of Watkins’s photos, he suggests that they forever changed the way we saw Yosemite, as a “landscape,” rather than simply land. Watkins created a new vantage of the area by taking clear, detailed images of sites anyone could see, but from a grander perspective, which showed not just a single mountain, but the trees that frame it, the lake that holds its reflection, the sky that illuminates its contours. They train the eye to see the larger, emotional experience. They expand our point of view to see the time and space that lives beyond their physical subjects. They show the future by contextualizing the present with the necessary details.

Maybe this is why I still find myself going out of my way to West Chicago when I go back to Illinois to visit my dad. When I see the farmhouse again, I miss the trees, but sitting out front, just looking, somehow feels satisfying. The memories of events that took place there surface like a stack of snapshots inside my mind. There’s my six-year-old self, helping my mother plant petunias on the side of our garage. There’s the diamond she made around the plant by touching her forefingers and thumbs together, pressing until the cube of dirt attached to its roots disappeared into the black soil she had turned over earlier that morning. There’s me, touching the fleshy lavender petals, poking the mess of metallic blue veins that spiraled from the flowers’ centers. There are the mill tailings, invisible but living with us, a part of the story now.

 

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ERIN LANGNER writes about art, architecture and identity. She is the author of the essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise. Her personal essays and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, Fourth Genre, The Offing, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and The Brooklyn Rail. 

Langner is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency and a Jack Straw Writers fellowship. She earned her MA in Museology from the University of Washington and is Manager of Editorial Projects at the Frye Art Museum. She is working on her second collection on the ways art helps us navigate time, space, and change throughout our lives. Find her on Bluesky @erinlangner.bsky.social or Instagram @erins_sweater.

Featured image by Jon Tyson, courtesy of Unsplash.