David Maisel: Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime

Description

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." David Maisel was born in New York in 1961. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, and are included in many permanent collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Maisel was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008, and a recipient of an individual artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, by David Maisel "[In nature] we may even glimpse the means with which to accept ourselves. Before nature, what I see does not truly belong to anyone; I know that I cannot have it, in fact, I'm not sure what I'm seeing." --Emmet Gowin The allure of the American West has captivated photographers since the earliest days of the medium. Photography was used as a tool to decipher the vastness of the new and unknown frontier. One can see a rich photographic form of manifest destiny stemming from pioneering documentarians like Timothy O'Sullivan in the 1800's to preservationists like Ansel Adams in the 1960's. Although the intentions of these photographers have shifted over time, the landscape has provided consistent inspiration for our deepest desires. In more recent history, our concerns about our footprint on the environment have led photographers to investigate deeper than what's easily accessible. David Maisel is a photographer of the current wave of contemporary artists concerned with hidden land -- remote sites of industrial waste, mining, and military testing that are not yet indexed on Google Maps. His latest book, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime (Steidl), observes the land from a god-like perspective of the sky and with an obsession with environmental destruction. "The original impetus for the work was informed by looking really closely at 19th-century exploratory photography," explains Maisel, "and then, an arc through the New Topographics work of the 70s." He cites the work of iconic black-and-white image makers like Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams -- photographers who focused on man-altered landscapes -- but felt inspired to "push it further." This epic project began almost thirty years ago in a plane over Mount St. Helens. Maisel, a 22-year-old photography student, was accompanying his college professor, Emmet Gowin, with his work. "That experience of being at Mt. St. Helen's was really formative," says Maisel. "I don't even know if I'd be a photographer. It was an essential moment for me." Flying in to view the crater of the volcano formed by the extreme force of Mother Nature, he photographed a large swath of deforestation, something the young photographer had never seen growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, N.Y. "As a kid at that point who had grown up in the suburbs of New York, I just never had seen a landscape put to work in that way by industry. Especially on that scale," says Maisel. The phenomenal destruction revealed a conflict in modern life that he's been fixated on since. In the 1980's, talking about the environment through art seemed out of step with the dialogue that was happening around Maisel as a young art student. Looking back, his formative work now stands somewhere between classic documentary and abstract expressionism. "Just bringing up Robert Smithson (the pioneering land artist) makes me remember. When I first got interested in him in the early 80's, that's not where the art world was at all. And it's not where this society was at all. This idea of looking at the environment and changes to the environment, was like, 'oh, that's ecology, that died in the 60s, we're done with that.'" In no way did that attitude derail his fascination in the environment -- instead, he began creating an artistic dialogue in nature as the inspiration. But it's Maisel's distinct intentions and conceptualization that separates the photographer from your average eco-activist, who's motivation to shoot may be based in a desire to preserve natural spaces or reveal the evils of industry. The work in Black Maps, unlike more polemic natural disaster photography, relies on abstraction. He creates full-frame surrealist visions of toxic lakes and captures the maddening designs of man-altered landscapes. In the abstract series The Lake Project (slide 15), viewers are overwhelmed by alien colors, allured by frame after frame of man-made destruction. The repetitive nature of viewing this destruction from a distance creates a sublime beauty in a classical sense. In less abstract work such as Oblivion (slide 7), which looks at the cityscapes of Los Angeles, the images become scorched black and white metaphors for the complete obliteration of a natural state. Over the years, Maisel published a few of these projects as separate volumes, but in Black Maps, the intention is to see their power as part of a dialogue with each other. "I think the feeling of being kind of overwhelmed is almost part of the aesthetic of the work," he says. "There are just certain real conundrums on how we are developing the planet and changing the planet, and I think that's what I still want to pursue," says the photographer. But where Maisel could accuse, he instead becomes reflective on these issues, providing evidence of what he's seeing and crafting in his printing process. "I was also really conscious that these sites were American," says Maisel. I was making a book about the country that I live in and that I know the best." TIME Lightbox March 27, 2013, by Paul Moakley, Paul Moakley is the Deputy Photo Editor at TIME. You can follow him on Twitter at @paulmoakley Steidl recently published a book compiling three years of research by Artur Walther into African photography. The conversation joins the representation inherited from an ethnographic tradition with local contributions, combining 19th century anthropological studies with older and contemporary social reporting. The portrait plays a major role. One of the central pieces of this historical selection is Santu Mofokeng's The Black Photo Album, along with a large sampling of contemporary photographers, Samuel Fosso's portraits with ironic captions, Pieter Hugo's digitally colored faces, Guy Tilim's portraits of the Mai Mai militia in the DRC, Zanale Muholi's portraits of the South African gay community, and David Goldblatt's involuntarily ethnographic gallery. Supplemented with historical and aesthetic essays by thirteen professors and curators, the photographs in the book and exhibition reveal the complexity of the question of representation in African photography. Read the full article on the French version of Le Journal. Laurence Cornet June 27, 2013 Exhibition: Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive June 8, 2013 - May 17, 2015 Reichenauerstr. 21 89233 Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen Germany T +49 731 176 9143