A look inside: Robbie Maynard's Superfund Project in New Haven
- Irene Michnicki
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Earlier this year, I came across a video Robbie Maynard had made about New Haven and reached out to tell him I appreciated the work. English Station, the monolithic abandoned power plant sitting just behind our building, is one of the sites in Robbie's ongoing project documenting superfund sites across the region, and it's literally in Milestone's backyard. I invited him to stop by the studio, we started messaging back and forth, and Robbie made his first visit to Milestone on July 13th. A friendship followed, and his new video (embedded at the bottom of this post) highlights his subsequent visits to New Haven and to Milestone.
Robbie is a New England based photographer shooting on medium format film. His long-term project, SUPERFUND, is a photographic survey of contaminated American landscapes and the communities that live alongside them. It isn't a catalog of disaster.
The project is actually a study of coexistence: how a toxic site becomes part of the everyday backdrop, how remediation becomes its own kind of industry, how a neighborhood keeps living in the shadow of something most of the country would rather not think about. English Station is the sixth site in the survey, and the one closest to home for Milestone Graphics.
A studio visit captured on film
Part of the video follows Robbie setting up his medium format camera on street corners, the tops of parking garages and other locations around New Haven, framing the tanks, towers, and overgrown fence lines that surround English Station. Then it moves inside Milestone, where he spent time photographing the studio and the printmaking process itself.
Woven through that footage are portraits, including one of me in my Tamarind Institute apron, roller in hand, shot right in the middle of the shop with the press, prints and stones around me. It's a great match, honestly. Robbie's work is about looking closely at places and things that hold onto their history whether or not anyone's paying attention, and litho stones carry that same kind of memory in their surface. Both practices are, in their own way, about what stays behind and what gets pulled up out of it.
Much gratitude to Robbie for his wonderful storytelling, dedication to his craft, and his kindness.
Watch the video
Watch the first New Haven video here - Where the City Ends: Documenting New Haven's Contaminated Borderlands
To see more of Robbie's work, including the rest of the SUPERFUND project, visit superfund-project.com or follow him on Instagram @robbiemaynardcreates & YouTube @RobbieMaynardCreates
Connect with Milestone Graphics
If you're an artist, photographer or creative curious about what a collaboration with Milestone could look like, get in touch. We would love to hear what you're working on.
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