This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
David Maisel creates abstract images using an SLR camera -- and a Cessna aeroplane. His subject is the US landscape, where frontier meets industry. "There's got to be a story -- something compelling about the history of the place, or what's happening there," he says. For instance, Maisel researched the evaporating ponds of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, used for purifying minerals extracted from the earth, before travelling to shoot there.
On arrival at a site, he flies over the vast area in a Cessna with a side-window removed, looking for regions that are "aesthetically arresting and to some degree bizarre or surreal or challenging". He then leans out of the window as the pilot makes severe banks, "so I can look more or less straight down -- you get these forking, twisting forms in the landscape." The final images aren't digitally altered and Maisel hopes the sites themselves reveal something about his own process: "I'm teasing apart different aspects of what compromises photography. To print photos, we need paper, so I've looked at logging sites. The printer colours are all pigment based -- so to be looking at tungsten mines makes a lot of sense."
Masiel started shooting aerial landscapes in 1983; his new book, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, collects his work for the first time. Despite the title, Maisel, who turns 52 this month, doesn't want it to be an environmental screed. "We're all collectively betraying something -- not this industry or that.
We're participating in the undoing of the natural world -- and that's the apocalypse. It's an end game."
<span class="s2">davidmaisel.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
