David Maisel – Black Maps
- 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.
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.”
Essays by leading critics and curators in fields of photography, art, and urbanism accompany these major bodies of work, elaborating on contemporary issues of resource management, landscape interpretation and visuallity that Maisel's work has anticipated and explored from his earliest work until today. BLACK MAPS is a landmark monograph in the career of a major photographic artist.