"Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition David Maisel--black maps: American landscape and the apocalyptic sublime, organized by the CU Boulder Art Museum at the University of Colorado"--Colophon.
Contents:
Black maps : an exquisite problem / Julian Cox -- The forest : the language of logging / Kirsten Rian -- The mining project : eliciting anxiety in the presence of the sublime / Natasha Egan -- The lake project : a dread close to zero / Kazys Varnelis -- Report from the lake / David Maisel -- Oblivion : city of forgetting / Alan Rapp -- Terminal mirage : unrecoverable spin / Joseph Thompson -- American mine : infinite exchange / Geoff Manaugh -- Black maps / Mark Strand
Summary:
This 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.
