Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, near Richland, Washington, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Lelio Orsi (Italian, 1511-1587), Apotheosis of Hercules as a Genius, ca. 1536. Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 153d
Hanford, where plutonium was processed for the Manhattan Project, became so contaminated that it needed to be scraped off the face of the earth. Gowin first saw Hanford from a plane on a return trip to Mount St. Helens. His fortuitous encounter with “the ghost of a city” prompted a decisive move into aerial work. The troubled state of the planet, he felt, called for “a new mythology.”
During a fit of madness induced by Zeus’s wife, Hera, Hercules killed his own wife and children—the tragic fate of a man with too much power for his own good.