Harnessing Photography as a Force for Social Impact: The Transformation of NYC’s Freshkills from Largest Waste Landfill to Utopian Wilderness
Q&A with Jade Doskow, Photographer-in-Residence
Jade Doskow is a New York-based architectural and landscape photographer known for her rigorously composed and eerily poetic images that examine the intersection of people, architecture, nature, and time. Doskow is best-known for her work Freshkills, Lost Utopias and Red Hook. The monograph of the Lost Utopias series was published in 2017 by Black Dog London. Doskow holds a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is the subject of the 2021 documentary Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias; the film has screened internationally at film festivals and at cultural institutions such as the Asheville Art Museum and the International Center of Photography. Doskow’s photographs have been featured in The New York Times, VQR, Urban Omnibus/Architectural League of New York, Aperture, Photograph, Architect, Wired, Musée Mag, Smithsonian, Slate, and Newsweek Japan. Doskow is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, both in New York. Recent and current exhibitions include at the Museum of Modern Art, Asheville Art Museum, Alice Austen House, Tracey Morgan Gallery, and Cornell University. Doskow is the Photographer-in-Residence of Freshkills Park, New York City.
All photographs © Jade Doskow from the Freshkills series unless otherwise indicated.
Jade Doskow, architecture and landscape photographer, has documented the transformation of New York City’s most notorious waste dumps into a huge public park that is a model project touching on important issues related to landfill reclamation, urban development, climate change and waste management. Her work represents a window into how art can support building awareness of these critical social issues and engage both communities and professionals in supporting leading edge environmental initiatives.
I became aware of Jade’s work on Freshkills as a student in one of her classes at the International School of Photography and have followed its progress for several years. Recently I had the opportunity to pose a series of questions to Jade about Freshkills’ transformation and the unique role of Photographer-in-Residence associated with this project.
Sandra Kresch: What is the objective of the Freshkills Park project in Staten Island, New York City?
Jade Doskow: In a city as simultaneously ethereal and gritty as New York, huge public-space projects are few and far between – the largest park project was that of Central Park in the late 19th century. Within the five boroughs that comprise New York, Staten Island has long had the unfortunate role of the ‘forgotten borough,’ the borough most unlike the others, regarding culture and politics.
The New Wilderness, Freshkills, 2019
Until the late 19th century, Staten Island was a bucolic place, a haven for the wealthy to escape the heat and pollution of Manhattan and home to beautiful farmsteads – including the country getaway of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Manhattan’s Central Park. With the increase in density in Lower Manhattan during the period of rapid immigration in the early 20th century residents who were deemed unhealthy, mentally or physically, were sent to outer islands, notably Staten Island, Hart Island, and Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).
People also started to dump garbage, organic and inorganic, into the marshlands; there was scant understanding as to the environmental value of marshlands at this time. Thus began the terrible beginnings of what was to become Fresh Kills Landfill, opened (un)ceremoniously under the hand of Robert Moses, New York’s most notorious politician, builder, and urban planner, in 1948.
Dusk, East Mound, 2022
Between 1948 and 1996, 150 million tons of garbage were ultimately deposited upon the North, South, East, and West mounds of Freshkills resulting in 200-foothills of trash across the 2,200 acres sea level wetland (nearly six times larger than Central Park). 1991 represented the peak of garbage deposits, with 29,000 tons arriving daily, ranging from food, paper, plastic and metal waste to potentially more hazardous items including televisions, engine oil, and solvents. It is said that the site was clearly visible from space at this time.
Staten Islanders had to suffer the horrifying odors and air quality emanating from the site, the constantly negative reputation of Staten Island as a direct result of the landfill, as well as bits and scraps of trash that would ultimately escape upon windy days. There have been numerous studies to analyze direct health consequences, including cancer, as a result of living near the landfill; while many of the studies are non-conclusive, there have been a noticeable percentage of locals suffering from lower respiratory illnesses.
The decision was made in the 1990’s to close the site to additional garbage and turn the mounds into a highly unique wilderness park. The only time Freshkills was reopened since then was to accept the rubble and remains from the Twin Towers tragedy in Manhattan in 2001. This sacred portion of the site is the largest mound at Freshkills, the 545-acre West Mound, which I have returned to multiple times and always treat with great reverence while working, always conscious of the history, personal and global, contained in the newly planted meadows beneath my feet.
Newly Formed Landscapes with Geotextile, West Mound, 2022
The 30-year Freshkills master plan’s focus is to replace the decommissioned landfill with the second-largest park in New York City (only after Pelham Bay Park), while using decomposing waste to support sustainable energy generation and wetlands management as a tool in protecting nearby neighborhoods from storm surges and the impact of climate change. Since 2001, Parks and Sanitation staff including engineers, chemists, landscape architects, and ecologists, have been developing cutting-edge systems of operation to create an expansive, engineered wilderness, comprised of rolling hills planted with species indigenous to the area, simultaneously intensely natural and unnatural.
In the midst of the global climate crisis, Freshkills presents an intriguing perspective, albeit nuanced and imperfect, demonstrating the forward-thinking optimism involved when innovative urban planners embark on revitalizing a landscape devastated by human activity. It showcases the transformation of a landfill, once the epitome of wastefulness and environmental disregard, into flourishing grasslands and revived waterways that now support diverse flora and fauna. Just a few of the species that have made Freshkills home include birds such as osprey, sedge wren, and the grasshopper sparrow; plant life that includes Big Bluestem, Honey Locust, and White Snakeroot; and aquatic life including the Atlantic Menhaden, the Alewife, and ribbed mussels. If 2,200 acres of New York City's waste can undergo such a remarkable metamorphosis, it inspires one to consider: what else is possible?
The objective with my work is to create a comprehensive multimedia archive of the site and its structuring and rebirth, capturing the myriad changes within this site over time, as well as to speak metaphorically to our changing relationship to nature and wilderness, while also making a record of an important chapter within New York City – the largest and most significant public park to be formed since Frederick Law Olmstead began creating Central Park in the late 19th century.
Kresch: How did you get involved with Freshkills Park?
Doskow: I first encountered Freshkills while teaching a photography class for the School of Visual Arts. We were photographing liminal green spaces around New York City – rooftop and community gardens, and nature paths alongside polluted waterways, including Freshkills.
I remember this initial visit to Freshkills well. A representative from the New York City Parks Department met me and my small group of students at the Staten Island Ferry and drove us to the site, leaving behind the bustle of lower Manhattan across the water, through busy and well-worn Staten Island commercial thoroughfares, past industrial sites and shipyards, to the park itself, driving slowly through a high fence and security checkpoint and finally onto the site.
Main Creek at Sundown, 2018
The view that unfolded around me as I stepped out of the van was staggering – seemingly infinite rolling hills of meadows punctuated with methane wells, grassland birds darting about, all with a dramatic backdrop of the New Jersey industrial skyline off in the distance.
Immediately fascinated and inspired, I inquired as to if there was a singular photographer who had taken on photographing the site – the answer was no – and so I submitted a lengthy project proposal to the Department of Sanitation of New York and the New York City Parks Department outlining my goal to photograph the site and make related work for the next ten years.
My proposal was approved by New York City Parks and New York City Department of Sanitation, and I began work there in August 2018. Having been on the site around 60 times in the past five years, the result is a large body of work.
New Roads and Stormwater Structure, West Mound, 2021
Kresch: The idea of a Photographer-in-Residence at Freshkills seems unusual. How did that position come to exist?
Doskow: The New York Department of Sanitation has had a rich history of partnering with artists and researchers. The first Sanitation Artist-in-Residence, beginning in 1977, was the community engagement/performance artist Mierle Ukeles, who created Touch Sanitation, which highlights the crucial contributions of the Sanitation workers to the functionality of the city. She also contributed toward the Freshkills master plan, including the design and concept for a sculptural viewing platform titled Landing, to be installed strategically for visitors to experience dynamic views across the waterways and acreage of the site.
While my work is primarily lens-based, I too aim to highlight the intricate engineering, design, and landscaping of Sanitation within Freshkills.
As my work continues to serve in an ambassadorial role for the site, it made sense to create an official title, Photographer-in-Residence. While I don’t actually reside at Freshkills, I have spent so much time working there, one could say my mental and spiritual life as an artist resides within Freshkills.
Kresch: What was the objective of the Photographer-in-Residence position – the goal of the work and how it creates social impact?
Doskow: Currently objectives for the work are to share the project as widely as possible to inspire conversations globally about how other damaged landscapes can be resurrected.
This is the largest landfill-to-park project on the planet and many of the design concepts and park infrastructure are innovative and unique, designed expressly for Freshkills.
The Storm, 2022
As humans continue to produce a phenomenal amount of garbage and plastic, there need to be realistic goals for how to deal with all of this endless consumption and waste. My hope is that the photographs and ideas around the Freshkills project can positively influence the public to both be more aware of their waste and think about and act on improving blighted areas in their own cities.
Kresch: As an artist, how did you approach telling the story of Freshkills Park, and what did you want to be the impact of your work?
Volunteer Trees, Winter, 2021
Doskow: There is no one approach that is appropriate for as complex a site as Freshkills – a place of paradox, beauty, and horror.
Landscape photography comes with its own sets of challenges, and in this case, I am presenting an artificial landscape, a constructed wilderness created atop 150,000,000 tons of human household waste. There is no predecessor for this kind of work, although there are related projects that I often look to – Richard Misrach’s Salton Sea; Lewis Baltz’s Candlestick Point; all of Robert Adams’ work. I visited the Salton Sea myself this past year; it is a continually degrading and dying environment in juxtaposition to Freshkills, which was dead and is being born again. Over the span of the last fifty years he has been photographing. Robert Adams’ work has been brutally honest in illustrating the ravages of human destruction on our natural world today. The Freshkills project is something a bit different, in bringing attention to a resurrection of a destroyed landscape, a reinvention of a wilderness that had been obliterated beyond recognition.
Some of my early work dovetailed with the themes of Freshkills in an exciting way. Specifically, Lost Utopias, in which I photographed the remaining architecture, landscaping, and public art of World’s Fairs internationally – touched on the demise of the golden promises of the future that typically are the subject of World’s Fairs. To quote a New York Times piece about the Freshkills work: “Throughout her photographic career, Ms. Doskow has been drawn to monumental architecture, particularly the abandoned pavilions of past World’s Fairs, which she collected in the series “Lost Utopias.” Freshkills was a perfect mirror image. Instead of a decaying relic of human aspiration, she encountered a new sort of landscape, incredibly wild and also human-made, blossoming from the refuse of the citizens.…”
From the ‘Lost Utopias’ series:
Montréal 1967 World’s Fair, Man and His World, Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome with Solar Experimental House, 2012
New York 1964 World’s Fair, Peace Through Understanding, Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion with Fresh Paint, 2017
Initially at Freshkills I was making pictures that I would call ‘tourist’ pictures – the grasslands of Freshkills with the city skyline beyond, that sort of thing.
New York City Skyline with One World Trade from North Mound, Looking Northeast toward Main Creek and the Greenbelt, Autumn, 2018
As the project has evolved, the work has taken on the multiple themes required to tell the story of both the process of regeneration and the results. For example, epic landscapes reminiscent of 19th century landscape painting; the physical materiality of elements used to artificially create a grassland, such as mounds of dirt and sand, biomesh, and wattles, as well as infrastructure around the site such as gravel roadways used by Sanitation and signage and methane wells; systems behind the scenes such as laboratories and workrooms within the leachate treatment plant; and simply the change of seasons as it radically transforms the site.
Leachate Plant, Veteran's Avenue Laboratory, 2020
The archive of work as it stands now spans an enormous range of subjects within the site.
Another objective is to represent how the New York City Department of Sanitation has for so many years worked hard to transform this site from landfill to wilderness. I hope my photographs ultimately serve as a comprehensive record of the hard work done by many New Yorkers who helped make this transformation a reality.
Kresch: As you photographed the Freshkills Park story, how did you interact with the Freshkills project team? How compatible were their project objectives with your artistic vision?
Doskow: When I first came on board, there was a robust arts program both within Sanitation and at Freshkills. We met and discussed my work as photographer, and they spent time with my previous work, Lost Utopias.
For the Freshkills project, the initial team included dedicated urban planners, biologists, and parks folks, who were wonderful to work with. They would work with me to schedule photography shoots a year out in advance and escort me around the site. It felt collaborative in spirit.
In my notebooks I often describe the site and the people of the site as ‘dedicated optimists.’ Freshkills is, as it stands now, a visionary project and one of the most important urban planning and park sites on the planet. It requires people with a big vision to really understand the power of this place. My colleagues on the Freshkills team appreciated the work I have done to date; they felt the project was a truly multidimensional and accurately representational record of the complicated nature of the site and the physical aspects involved in creating a grassland from scratch.
Ultimately, my position is very much that of an artist-partner, not as staff or employee, so the beauty of this arrangement as an artist-in-residence is that I do not have an obligation to marketing or public relations regarding how I represent the site. I am able to present the vision as I experience it without considerations that could be considered propogandist or commercial.
Kresch: How were the photographs you took used by the Freshkills project?
Doskow: In the public sphere, the archive of work I have been creating has had several public outlets and appeared in a multitude of forms. These public presentations have offered the opportunity to approach the Freshkills project from different perspectives both in terms of the issues underlying the conversations and the types of people engaged. Each has had a unique audience focused on its specific objective.
Breathing Life into Freshkills, Writing by Robert Sullivan, Photographs by Jade Doskow, The New York Times, August 16, 2020 * Page spread courtesy of the New York Times
A three-page spread appeared in the New York Times, accompanied by Robert Sullivan’s writing, focusing on contextualizing the photographs within the broader scope of industrial development in the American Northeast and environmentally degraded living conditions for the urban poor who have no choice but to live adjacent to such sites. Targeting a general consumer audience in a large circulation newspaper not only did this familiarize local residents of New York City with the changes in Freshkills, but it was also useful for the Freshkills Alliance team in attracting the fundraising required to keep the park development moving along.
Jade Doskow giving an artist talk at the opening reception of Freshkills exhibition, Cornell University John Hartell Gallery, Department of Art, Architecture & Planning, 2022 * Image courtesy of Lambert Fernando
A multi-dimensional set of programs with the Freshkills project at its center, organized within the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, took place in 2022. It included a solo exhibition of my photographs at Cornell University in the John Hartell Gallery, which is located within the Architecture, Art, and Planning Department – a place where students focusing specifically on urban planning and policy would experience the work. The exhibition was coupled with short films featuring my Freshkills work produced by the Cornell Just Places Lab. Additionally, at Cornell I presented a guest lecture about my work in the City and Regional Futures colloquium to an academic audience comprised of faculty and students in City and Regional Planning, also drawing from across the College or Architecture, Art, and Planning, spurring on a dynamic conversation among this audience of dedicated scholars in fields directly related to Freshkills.
A New Wilderness: Freshkills Lecture as part of the Future Cities Coloquium with the Just Places Lab, hosted by Jennifer Minner PhD/Cornell University/AAP, October 14, 2022, Abbey and Howard Milstein Auditorium * Image courtesy of Cornell AAP
In 2023, my Freshkills work appeared as part of a group exhibition on ecology at the Alice Austen House Museum and as part of the citywide Photoville photography festival, curated by Victoria Munro, Curator and Director of Alice Austen House. In that exhibition, the work was presented outside on large weatherproof banner material on the grounds of Alice Austen House Museum; the grounds of the museum are a public city park. Visitors to the park include Staten Island locals of all socioeconomic backgrounds, from fisherman to police to neighbors on the block to art-loving LGBTQIA visitors to the Alice Austen House Museum – a museum built upon the photographic and identity – legacies of Alice Austen, a 19th century queer large-format photographer. Visitors to the park could walk in physical space around cube-forms exhibiting the large photographs of Freshkills, considering the implications of this local landfill-turning-park.
Most recently, several of the photographs were presented in context with original archival photographs of Freshkills as an active landfill, renderings of future park designs, and biological data at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York New Publics, as part of an exhibition-within-the-exhibition curated by MoMA and Field Operations, the firm that won the design competition in 2005 for Freshkills Park’s master plan. New York New Publics presented twelve forward-looking public space projects within New York City, dealing with multiple challenges and aspects of urban life. The overarching tone of the exhibition was one of optimism for the future – Freshkills helped to represent a new way of dealing with blighted areas of the cityscape. An international audience visited the Freshkills exhibition at MoMA over a period of six months.
Freshkills as part of the outdoor public Photoville Festival, installed on the grounds of the Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island, New York City, June 2023
Kresch: Pictures are a powerful tool for engaging people with important issues that have impact on their lives. How was your work employed as a means to engage people in the social issues addressed by the Freshkills Park project?
Doskow: Exhibiting at Alice Austen House was important to me as it is a local Staten Island museum with visionary programming and a unique history. It was convenient for residents of Staten Island to visit both the exhibition within the museum as well as the outdoors Photoville work on display. Making the progress within Freshkills known and appreciated to the local communities is of utmost importance, in tandem with finding a global audience for all of the aspects of the site that are integral to conversation – waste management, circular reuse, rewilding and the success of flora and fauna, urban planning, urban landscape and public space design, and parks creation within the greater history of both New York and other cities.
I am an Adjunct Professor of Photography at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and often bring Freshkills into the conversation with my undergraduates, most of whom are Staten Islanders, but all of whom were born well after the site was closed and the transformation begun. Many of them have now visited the newly opened North Park Phase I, thereby ushering in a new generation of Staten Islanders who perceive the site only in a positive light, as it exists now.
Two views of North Park Phase I: (Left) The Bird Tower and (Right) Wetland Overlook Deck, 2023
Kresch: From your experience as Freshkills Park Photographer-in-Residence, what have you learned about the potential role of photography – and, by extension, other arts – as a tool to have impact on significant social issues? How can artists’ work engage the larger community in addressing the critical social issues of our time?
Doskow: Photography has long had the power to affect real change, be it political, environmental, or cultural. Looking at New York’s history and relationship to photography, we can look directly to the work of Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis – photographs that changed working and living conditions throughout our country into the future. The photographs of the Freshkills project have the potential to have the same impact on the future of waste management, climate change and urban planning.
Within my own career, the Freshkills work has built my credibility as an environmental photojournalist with the New York Times. Recent photo essays include a multi-page article on the entire city’s hardest hit neighborhood ten years after Hurricane Sandy and a recent piece on an unusual neighborhood known simply as ‘The Hole,’ situated at the lowest point below sea level in all the five boroughs, an apt metaphor for climate change. I see my Freshkills artwork and New York Times photojournalism as directly connected; both share vulnerable or transformative aspects of the city that are reflective of the ever-changing history of New York in the making and its relationship to global environmentalist consciousness.
When I proposed the idea of photographing ‘The Hole,’ it was with the direct goal of bringing attention – and hopefully, much needed funding – to the people of the neighborhood, people whose streets and homes constantly flood and whose homes are not connected to the city sewer system. As this article has only just published in December 2023, it has yet to be seen if this will directly affect policy in this corner of the city, but it has created awareness of an unaddressed environmental problem in need of attention.
Outtakes from New York Times article Snakes, Spores, and Sewage, Life in a Neighborhood Called 'The Hole,' December 17, 2023, Hilary Howard and Jade Doskow
Kresch: If you were to do this project again with the objective of producing excellent artistic work and significant social impact, what might you do differently? Are these two goals compatible or are there inherent conflicts between producing art and having impact on the social good?
Doskow: This is still very much a work in progress, in tandem with the site itself. While now (five years in) there exists a large archive of still photographs and several multimedia pieces bringing in field recordings and original electronic music, I anticipate incorporating more of a multimedia approach over the coming years. This may include explorations into sound/field recordings/interviews; sculpture; video; perhaps even drawing. As Freshkills exists in a multifaceted way in terms of its historical and present context, the work I am making must reflect the complicated nature of the site, whatever form that makes sense.
I am also preparing the early stages of the first book of the work with a goal to publish in 2025/2026. There are two wonderful, committed writers thus far – Tyler Green and Jennifer Minner – and part of this winter’s work will comprise of beginning early mockups of the book and sorting out a potential publisher. The aim of the book is of several considerations: to share a major New York City infrastructure project and what that looks like in the 21st century; to inspire change by moving closer to zero waste; and to improve environmentally degraded areas in diverse regions globally by experiencing the radical transformations of Freshkills through my photographs. The writing will contextualize the photographs in relation to urban planning, waste management, and parks creation.
The Freshkills project is one of the most challenging bodies of work I have ever taken on. The 2,200 acres offer infinite variations on the themes inherent to the site; what is difficult is eking out these truths and presenting them as clearly and sublimely as possible. The site, on a physical and topographical level, is one of abstraction; it is not a typical landscape or a typical wilderness; it is something else. Showing that ‘something else-ness’ of the site is my highest aim, and I hope that the pictures are somewhat successful in this regard.
What has been most satisfying is feeling a oneness with this site, with this piece of New York City, and really connecting with the unusual beauty and peace that now comprise Freshkills. It is only through multiple visits and collaborations with colleagues, scholars, musicians, that this truth of the site, perhaps the truthfulness of existence, feels most present in the work.
Prism/Discharge, East Mound, 2023
There is always potential inherent conflict between art and impact on the social good. Photography is a tool of pointing to, of representation, of symbolizing. Photographic reality is not reality. Freshkills is a polarizing subject, especially in New York. Many people – urban planners, theorists, longtime New Yorkers – are skeptical concerning the benefit of a park that ultimately requires infinite maintenance into the future due to its highly structured and engineered creation and existence: maintaining the structural integrity of the mounds so that they do not collapse; maintenance of complex systems of leachate piping and LFG wells; continued considerations of the biologic and ecological aspects of the site, such as prevention of invasive species from consuming the 2,200 acres.
As an artist, I ultimately create my own reality of Freshkills through the pictures – a reality that optimally reflects the inherent complications of humanity today, of what we have created, of what we have left behind, the remnants of our existence on this planet, in the form of garbage and unnatural looming mini-mountains of ethereal grasslands – glorious, horrifying, sublime, and paradoxical, all at once.
White Snakeroor, Mugwort, Honey Locust, and some others... (Overgrowth, Freshkills), 2021
About the Author:
Sandra Kresch has had a 40-year career focused on managing growth and change in consumer-driven businesses. She has worked extensively in the media and entertainment industries, building a range of nationally and internationally known businesses. A 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellow, Sandra has focused on the underlying causes of political polarization and the impact of identity and media in creating the environment in which polarization thrives. She is actively engaged in the political process, working on ideas for mitigating the impact of misinformation in creating polarization, facilitating conversation across the political divide and implementing structural change in the electoral process to create greater equality. She is a Senior Editor for the Social Impact Review.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
All photographs © Jade Doskow unless otherwise indicated.