The name promised family recreation—camping in northeastern Ohio’s rural landscape, s’mores and swimming and sleeping under stars. By the late 1970s, the Big D Campground had become something else entirely: a dumping ground for industrial chemical waste, volatile organic compounds and heavy metals leaching into soil and groundwater.

The transformation from vacation destination to toxic waste site represents one of the era’s most bitter betrayals. Families seeking healthy outdoor experiences unknowingly camped on land that would later require federal Superfund intervention. The very name—Big D—became ironic, a cheerful marketing promise attached to environmental contamination.

Masumi photographed the site in 1990, during early EPA remediation assessments. Her vertical format, unusual in her predominantly horizontal body of work, emphasizes the downward movement of contamination—toxins penetrating soil layers, infiltrating the aquifer below. The composition suggests the invisible dimension of this pollution: not something you could see, but something seeping beneath your feet.

This is one of seven Ashtabula County Superfund sites Masumi documented, a regional constellation of contamination reflecting northeastern Ohio’s industrial legacy and the inadequate environmental oversight of the pre-EPA era. The campground as crime scene, the recreational landscape as sacrifice zone.