Interviews Interview with ace photographer David Maisel
Maisel’s practice has focused primarily on environmentally impacted sites, in a multi-chaptered series called "Black Maps". His large-scaled photographs show the physical impact on the land from industrial efforts such as mining, logging, water reclamation, and military testing. Because these sites are often remote and inaccessible, Maisel frequently works from an aerial perspective, thereby permitting images and photographic evidence that would be otherwise unattainable.
Looking at your body of work, one comprehends complete involvement from your side. What is the mantra that keeps you motivated and lets you innovate with lighting, mood and the creative flow in your imagery?
I think what keeps me motivated is my own curiosity. There’s also, simply, the thrill and the challenge of creating a new body of work. I’m interested in making the kinds of pictures that I haven’t made before—indeed, perhaps the kinds of pictures that haven’t been seen before. I become energized by this process.
David, you are a trained landscape architect. Was photography a side hobby that unexpectedly took off or are you fully invested in the life of a photographer?
I was trained in architecture and landscape architecture, but never practiced either. Through my twenties, I moved back and forth between these studies and the study and practice of photography. I found that one field informed the others.
Do you remember the first object you shot?
Light coming through a window and casting delicate shadows; very minimalist.
What is it about nature photography that inspires you to create such outstanding works of art?
I don’t think of my work as nature photography. I’m interested in responding to the world. Ultimately, I don’t consider my aerial work to be documentary images- they are not pure in that respect. They are theoretical, not cartographic; they are as interested in exploring the unconscious as the objective. They have my thumbprint all over them. They are, in a sense, meditations.
“Every image is a new composition, and as the photographer, I need to be highly aware of these changing compositions as the plane and I move through space.”
How did you choose to get into aerial topographical photography of water, mountains and the land?
As an undergraduate student, I studied photography with Emmet Gowin, who was involved in a long-term photographic project at Mount Saint Helens. I accompanied him on a trip there, and we did some work from the air over in the vicinity of the volcano. Beyond the destruction of the landscape due to the natural forces of the volcano, I was drawn to consider human intervention in the landscape---changes made to the environment by such efforts as clear-cut logging, open pit mining, and other arenas of natural resource reclamation.
Looking at your ‘Oblivion’ series, it seems that you have enhanced everything that is terrible about living that way. Where did you draw your inspirations for the same? Was there any particular reason for casting the entire series in black and white?
I wanted the city to seem as though it was post-nuclear---a city made of ash. If you look closely at these images, you will see that they are tonally reversed, printed as negative versions of the originals.
“I am never in the same place twice, so no image can be repeated- it is a stream of images and possible framings that is not unlike the stream of consciousness itself.”
What were the challenges you faced while shooting the pictures from air, if any?
Working from the air is a challenge in many ways. It is physically demanding. It can be very cold and windy, and my fingers can lose dexterity, making film changing a challenge! Beyond that, I often work at elevations that are so high that (as one of my pilots explained to me) my brain isn’t receiving the usual amount of oxygen. From an aesthetic point of view, working from the air means, of course, that I am in constant motion; thus, no two frames can ever be the same. Every image is a new composition, and as the photographer, I need to be highly aware of these changing compositions as the plane and I move through space. Naturally, I am never in the same place twice, so no image can be repeated- it is a stream of images and possible framings that is not unlike the stream of consciousness itself. Motion gets dissected and reanimated.
‘The Lake Project’ comprises images made near Owens Lake in California, which was drained and depleted to bring water to LA. It also became an enormous environmental disaster in the process. Could you tell us a bit more about the project?
The Lake Project is the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid stretch of land. For decades, fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic and other materials. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. It is this contemporary version of the sublime that I find compelling.
“The concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red.”
In The Lake Project, the lake has become the locus of water’s absence. The lake is a negation of itself, a void. To grow the city of Los Angeles is to deplete, starve, or implode the body of water that once comprised Owens Lake. This is not to say that the lake has been stripped of its inherent beauty. But its beauty has been subjugated by its use, and while its physical condition may be thrilling to behold—planes of poison in hues of red, green, amber, and turquoise—it is a beauty born of environmental degradation. There is a sense of both seduction and betrayal with these images, and the viewer is ultimately complicit in their absorption by this toxic liquid. The Lake Project images serve, in a sense, as the lake’s autopsy.
Can you comment on the gradual transformation one goes through in his mind while reading the pieces of ‘The Lake Project’ and after being actually informed about the actual reasons for the colourations and textures – pollution, algae growth etc.
I think it is a process of seduction and betrayal—one is seduced by the visual aspects of the images, and then betrayed by that beauty when learning more of the facts about the sites at which they were made.
Your ‘History’s Shadow’ is a collection of x-rayed images, which serve to record and observe the ‘lifetime’ of a work, to map their history, the scars and trauma of a potentially mysterious past, and their future transformation and decay. How did you come up with this unique idea?
During a residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, I began to explore the idea of images that were created in the processes of art preservation, where the realms of art and scientific research overlap each other. While photographing the Getty Museum’s conservation departments, I became captivated by x-rays of art objects from the museum’s permanent collections. The ghostly images of these x-rays seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art. These spectral renderings seemed like transmissions from the distant past, conveying messages across time. More recently, I’ve been working with the x-ray archives from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, from which my images of buddhas and vessels are derived.
“There is a sense of both seduction and betrayal with these images, and the viewer is ultimately complicit in their absorption by this toxic liquid. The Lake Project images serve, in a sense, as the lake’s autopsy.”
People like to talk about their 'lucky breaks' but I think it's more hard work and passion that leads to a breakthrough to becoming a professional photographer. When was your breakthrough?
If I really had a lucky break, I suppose it was in 1983, working with Emmet Gowin at Mount Saint Helens. But I agree with you, the idea of one’s career being made by lucky breaks is rather absurd. Hard work and passion have much more to do with developing as an artist.
Do you consider yourself to be a technical person or an artistic person and why?
I’m both. A certain amount of technical knowledge creates a space for artistic expression. At the same time, I make leaps in my artistic practice that are not at all dependent on the technical. The technical just enables me to make certain moves in my work, to render images as I want them to be rendered.
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