The Lake Project

For more than two decades, David Maisel has photographed civilization’s aggressive advance across the American landscape. The sites he has pursued, the subjects he has discovered, and the abstract beauty he has confronted are all the more unfamiliar and disarming because of their aerial perspectives. Looking down from low-flying aircraft banking steeply over the terrain, Maisel constructs skewed landscapes that seem at times to have no horizons, no up or down, no near or far. The Lake Project documents Maisel’s work around Owens Lake. This arid expanse, located just east of the Sierra Nevadas, is for the most part a desiccated bed of mineral deposits. Drained for the water needs of Southern California, it now contributes carcinogenic particles to the atmosphere during “dust events.” These are not normal landscapes; there is no foreground, middle ground, or background but only the ground itself, teeming with malignant colors. David Maisel lives and works in California. This oversized book, superbly printed in color on matte Japanese art paper, is his first monograph.