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Dangerous Waters: A Photo Essay on the Tennessee Valley Authority

Amazon.com Price:  $35.56 (as of 12/04/2019 08:09 PST- Details)

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Description

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in the 1930s throughout Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sweeping New Deal governmental reforms, has long marked the landscape of the upper south and controlled the waterways that run during Tennessee and portions of its bordering states. Controversial even at its inception, TVA grew to grow to be the largest public power agency in the US, combining social welfare goals with technological innovation and regional modernization. What began as a social uplift project for a depressed Tennessee Valley has, over many decades, devolved into an underfunded agency unable to adequately care for its a large number of dams, visitor centers, and recreational spaces. In Dangerous Waters, documentary photographer Micah Cash uses his keen eye to highlight the wonderful thing about TVA’s vast architecture and brilliant engineering, but also its tenuous relationship with environmental stewardship and intermittent neglect of the social goals upon which the agency was founded. Cash illustrates TVA’s contradictions through poignant shots of the agency’s locations. He starkly captures, for instance, the artificial juxtaposition of beach sand at the shores of Douglas lake or the monumental infrastructure of South Holston, foregrounded by local gravestones. Cash’s photographs also depict the increased security measures of a post-9/11 world, as many dams, visitors’ centers, and scenic vistas are now blocked by haphazard fencing, bolt locks, and warning signs, further alienating would-be visitors. The conflict represented within each image mirrors the battle TVA will have to fight as an agency: to further its development of the Tennessee Valley and, at the same time, preserve both the agency’s original vision and the natural environment of the region. This is a challenge TVA will have to surmount, but continued budget cuts, a on occasion disinterested public, and the War on Terror have made the fight more difficult. Replete with color images and essays that are both personal and probing, Dangerous Waters deftly illuminates TVA as a complicated force operating within the Tennessee Valley and beyond. Cash’s photographs beautifully showcase the dual reality in which TVA operates, and this book is sure to captivate readers and reignite a conversation on the direction of TVA.

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