What Do You Photograph When Harm Is No Longer Spectacular?

IN A STRIKING photo from August 2015, three kayakers on the Animas River near Durango, Colo., float in a plume of mustard-yellow water. They happened to be on the river the same morning that Environmental Protection Agency workers accidentally ruptured a retaining wall at the abandoned Gold King Mine upstream, sending 3 million gallons of wastewater contaminated with metals into southern Colorado’s rivers. According to the House Committee on Natural Resources, “EPA’s disaster dumped hundreds of tons of pollutants into a river that flows across four states—affecting farmers, treatment systems for safe drinking water and livelihoods, but no one has been punished.”