(Image: Steven Hirsch, Chronos, 2014. Digital C-print)

The Gowanus canal is no great beauty. The waterway stretches through 3 kilometres of New York City, thoroughly polluted over the years with sewage from local factories. The US Environmental Protection Agency has called the Gowanus one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the country. Scientists have even discovered new species of microbes in the canal, evolved to thrive in a soup of chemicals and garbage.

But when artist Steven Hirsch looked at the canal, he saw something different. Hirsch, a Brooklyn native, visited the Gowanus in the early mornings before workers arrived. The pockets of oil and slime on the surface, photographed in the “dead light” of the new day, revealed a dizzying mixture of purples, oranges, greens and blues. Though he intensified the colours later, all originated in the canal’s toxic sludge.

The photographs will be on show for the rest of the month at the Lilac Gallery in New York. Hirsch says the exhibition isn’t intended to draw attention to environmental issues, he just found the canal an unusually rich source of powerful colours and shapes. Similar sites nearby – like Newtown Creek, a heavily polluted estuary along the border of Brooklyn and Queens – haven’t turned up the same results.


“I couldn’t find anything like what I was trying to do at the Gowanus,” he says. “The palette is there for me. It’s like a studio. I just need to go back to the same studio again.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Psychedelic pollution”