The Cloud of Unknowing

David T. Hanson is known for his studies of environmental disregard. He has photographed what we might regard as visual indifference, even devastation, on the surface of the inhabited landscape, and done so with purpose far beyond the simple documenting of suburban or industrial intrusion. There was an urgency to his record of a desecration. Ironically, he has photographed this subject exquisitely. His previous books Wilderness to Wasteland (2016), Colstrip, Montana (2010) a survey of strip-mining, and Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape (1997) offered the testimony of an unsparing eye. As a counterpoint to what can only be described as the toxic, he has now made an extraordinary document of sacred, cherished spaces, shrines, `resting places for the spirit¿, which transcend all religious divisions and suggest a universal point of focus. Under the title The Cloud of Unknowing, derived from the expression of a medieval Christian mystic, but equally applicable to the voice of a Buddhist seer, Hanson has redressed the imbalance of corrupted space with that of profound harmony. The photographs provide the exterior descriptions of sacred sites from Indian reservations, missionary churches, the temples of the modern world and the ancient, to suggest a contemplation at an interior level that transcends geography and survives in the most unexpected corners of contemporary life.