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. In more than 100 photos that span Maisels career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today. Maisels 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 artists grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts.