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Black Maps
Photographs by David Maisel
September 4 – December 4, 2007
National Academy of Sciences
2100 C St., N.W., Rotunda Gallery
Open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Free! Photo ID Required.
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The sublime large-scale aerial photographs in this exhibition show the impact of human activities on the Great Salt Lake, Owens Valley, and the Los Angeles basin. They focus on strip mines, forest clear-cuts, cyanide leaching fields, and tailings ponds.
Maisel frames the complexities of environmentally impacted landscapes with equal measure of documentation and metaphor, beauty and despair. He is not attempting to make literal records of environmental destruction, but rather seeks a distance that alters and abstracts the conventional reading of the landscape. As art historian Diana Gaston stated, "In this altered state, the laws of gravity are undone, solid ground gives way, and the photograph is experienced as a transcendent vision or poem, as much as a map of ecological disaster."
During his undergraduate work at Princeton University in the early 1980s, Maisel accompanied photography professor Emmet Gowin on several flights over Mount St. Helens and the heavily logged forests of the Pacific Northwest. He attributes the origins of this series to those trips.
Maisel is based in the San Francisco Bay area, and his work is held in the collections of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Princeton University, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. His first book, "The Lake Project," was published by Nazraeli Press in 2004, and was selected as one of the top 25 photography books of that year by critic Vince Aletti.
This exhibition was organized and circulated by the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach Community College, Daytona Beach, Florida.
Image: David Maisel, The Lake Project 3, 2003, chromogenic print, 48 x 48 inches
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