Published by Radius Books/Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University. Text by Geoff Manaugh, Tyler Green, William L. Fox, David Maisel, Katie Lee-Koven.
Aerial and on-site photographs made at a classified military site in the Great Salt Lake Desert by David Maisel, author of Black Maps
David Maisel’s (born 1961) Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military site covering nearly 800,000 acres in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. After more than a decade of inquiry, Maisel was granted access to this facility in order to photograph the terrain, the testing facilities and other aspects of the site.
Maisel began by photographing at ground level, focusing on structures related to the testing of chemical warfare dispersal patterns. He then moved to an aerial perspective to create images that resemble large-scale minimalist drawings inscribed on the land. Maisel’s work at Dugway also includes photographs of the newly minted WSLAT (Whole System Live Agent Test) facility, which is devoted to identification and neutralization of chemical and biological toxins that can be weaponized by terrorists or rogue nations.
Black Maps is the first in-depth survey of the major aerial projects by David Maisel, whose images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. In more than 100 photos that span Maisel's career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today. Maisel's images of environmentally impacted sites consider the aesthetics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, rampant urbanization and sprawl, and zones of water reclamation. These surreal and disquieting photos take us towards the margins of the unknown and as the Los Angeles Times has stated, argue for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.
“In his book Warped Space, the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler speaks of the “paranoiac space of modernism,” a space which is “mutated into a realm of panic, where all the limits and boundaries become blurred.” These words come to mind when considering the urban aerial images of Los Angeles and its periphery. Certain spacial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls and gated developments, highway entrance and exit ramps, lays unfurled over the landscape like a sheet over a cadaver. . . As we cast a critical eye upon the megalopolis of Southern California, it is necessary to remind ourselves that there is still a heart beating within it. Indeed, 15 million hearts, with all the souls and dreams of the bodies powered by those hearts: the city as living, breathing organism, constantly breaking down and constantly replicating.” — David Maisel. The 15 aerial photographs of Los Angeles that make up Oblivion are distressingly beautiful, their post-apocalyptic feeling enhanced by reversed-out tones. Maisel shares with us his “shadowland,” a place previously unobserved that coexists with its sunstruck version. Introduction by William L. Fox.
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In this elegant volume, David Maisel first publishes images made more than 20 years ago, of clearcut logging sites in northern Maine. The title refers to a series of environmental crises triggered by extinctions within an ecosystem. Accompanied by an excerpt from Susan Stewart’s poem The Forest, the images and words together limn an elegy for that which has incontrovertibly vanished.
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David Maisel’s work has always been concerned with processes of memory, excavation, and transformation. These themes are given new form in his latest work, History’s Shadow. In this series, Maisel re-photographs x-rays from museum archives that depict artifacts from antiquity, scanning and digitally manipulating the selected source material. X-rays have historically been used by art conservators for structural examination of art and artifacts much as physicians examine bones and internal organs; they reveal losses, replacements, construction methods, and internal trauma invisible to the naked eye. By transcribing both the inner and outer surfaces of their subjects simultaneously, they form spectral images of indeterminate space, depth, and scale. The resulting photographs seem like transmissions from the distant past, both spanning and collapsing time. They express – through feeling and art, as well as science and reason – the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. The book contains an original short story by Jonathan Lethem that was inspired by Maisel’s images.
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David Maisel: Black Maps
David Maisel: Oblivion
David Maisel: One Picture Book #49: Cascade Effect
David Maisel: History's Shadow
