Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime
by David Maisel
Buy on AmazonThis 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.…
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"From cyanide-leaching ponds to open-pit mines to the sprawl of urbanization, Maisel’s mesmerizing photographs — which, without context, could be mistaken as much for abstract impressionism as they could for cellular microscopy — capture fragments of the landscape that “correspond to the structure of human thought and feeling.”"
Best Photography Books of 2013 · themarginalian.org