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David Maisel doesn't consider himself an environmental activist. Yet his large-scale aerial photographs of strip mines, a bone-dry lake bed and man-made evaporation ponds can be viewed as indictments of our indifference to the planet that sustains us. Once you figure them out, that is. The photographs call to mind everything from blood vessels to stained-glass windows. "They might be mirrors into who we are as a society and who we are in our psyches," Maisel says.
At a recent exhibit (traveling through 2010) of Maisel's "Black Maps"—aptly titled because they leave most viewers in the dark as to where they are—his Terminal Mirage 1 (p. 56) looked to me like a neat grid of farmland seen from an airplane window. Except that instead of familiar tans and greens, there are eye-popping blues and whites. Maisel's Terminal Mirage 10 could be a loopy combine operator's excursion through a wheat field. Though Maisel chooses not to provide explanatory labels for his photographs, wanting viewers to come to their own conclusions, in an interview he identified Terminal Mirage 1 as evaporation ponds bordered by berms, and Terminal Mirage 10 as tire tracks through the crusted surface of an evaporation pond. Both are from near Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Maisel also wants to challenge our notions of beauty. He thus describes the usual reaction to his work as "this experience where people are seduced by the seeming surface beauty of an image, and then as they learn more about what it is they may be looking at, they realize that there is, in a way, a betrayal." Bright colors become ugly stains, painterly strokes morph into indelible gouges and marbled veneers turn out to be leached toxins. "We sense that this violent range of continuous colors is extraordinary and possibly dangerous," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where five of Maisel's works are part of the permanent collection. "Nevertheless, we are drawn in by their formal beauty."
His latest projects venture into urban landscapes and non-aerials but have the same hauntingly beautiful aesthetic. Oblivion (2004-6), a series of Maisel aerials of Los Angeles, reflects on the consequences of diverting water to that city from Owens Valley in southeastern California. Library of Dust captures corroding copper canisters that hold the unclaimed, cremated remains of patients who died from the 1880s to the 1970s in a state-run psychiatric hospital in Salem, Oregon.
Growing up on Long Island in the 1960s and '70s, Maisel, 46, lived on a suburban block where most of the houses had identical floor plans. To many postwar Americans, these inexpensive, cookie-cutter dwellings represented the American dream. But to the youngster, the conformity seemed strange, even disorienting. "It's all so disparate, confused and without a center," he says. "When you're a little kid, you think, "How can someone live in the same house as I do? How could that be?' " He took note of the subtle shifts in paint color, the shapes of trim and the widths of driveways, trying to make sense of it all. At Princeton, where he studied art history and visual arts, he accompanied one of his professors to Mount St. Helens, which had erupted shortly before, taking photographs of the volcano and surrounding terrain. "It was an introduction to a way of seeing," says Maisel. "I witnessed how the logging industry was changing the landscape and came away with a few aerial photos. The two came together and suggested ways to continue." He did so by photographing sand quarries along the Delaware River as well as mines in Pennsylvania and out West.
When he was in his 20s, working as an assistant to an architectural photographer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired three of his pieces. In 1993, to be closer to the topography he was most passionate about, he moved from New York City to San Francisco. From there he scoured the Western states, looking for bizarre patterns. He says locations tend to choose him, as when he first spotted the glittering pink bed of Owens Lake through a car window.
Maisel often hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings. Then, somewhere between 500 and 11,000 feet, the pilot banks the plane and the photographer props open a window and starts shooting with his hand-held, medium-format camera. "Although the subjects are always of concern to me, I do think that I want to lead the viewer into a space where they can do their own thinking," he says.
Megan Gambino is an editorial assistant at Smithsonian.
Comments
Great job Meg! Well written article and I'm looking very forward to seeing the pictures in the January issue! Congratulations!!!
Posted by Nick Gambino on December 21,2007 | 10:37AM
I was looking for David Maisel posters or books of his photographs on your website and there is no mention of them. Very disappointing to feature such a fascinating artist with no options for purchasing his works.
Posted by Jeanne Johns on December 23,2007 | 05:46AM
Jeanne, Several of my books ("The Lake Project" and "Oblivion") are available through the publisher Nazraeli Press. See www.nazraeli.com. Cheers, David Maisel
Posted by David Maisel on January 1,2008 | 09:19PM
Megan, your article is very well-written and engaging. David, your work is stunning. I love the contrast and contradiction in it. My one disappointment is the negative comments posted here. Is it so hard to appreciate beauty for beauty's sake and give people their due when it's so deserved?
Posted by Val on January 4,2008 | 10:08AM
Megan & David, Well done! Mining is a fundamental human endeavor and at times very beautiful to behold. In this vein, I invite you to visit www.airphotona.com and use the keyword SM4. From an on-line colection of 10,000+. Jim Wark
Posted by Jim Wark on January 10,2008 | 08:23AM
Beautiful, beautiful work! The article mentions that this is part of a traveling exhibit. Please give me the dates and locations.
Posted by Joan Towle on January 20,2008 | 06:53PM
please provide information about where this exhibit will be in the future.
Posted by devonne baneck on January 24,2008 | 03:18PM
David - I am so excited for you. What a wonderful article and affirmation of your work. Little did I know when we were growing up and hanging out with your sister how talented you were. Keep doing these wonderful pictures!
Posted by Ronny Needleman Fisher on January 29,2008 | 11:25AM
David - I loved the article and your photographs and would love to go to the exhibit to see them. The article says the exhibit runs through 2010 but didn't mention where they are on exhibit. I've searched on-line and cannot find the exhibit schedule either. Can you help me?
Posted by Susan Crawford on April 7,2008 | 05:47AM