Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime

Photographs and essay by David Maisel
Introduction by Julian Cox
Essays by Natasha Egan, Geoff Manaugh, Alan Rapp, Kirsten Rian,
Joseph Thompson, and Kazys Varnelis
Poem by Mark Strand
Book design by Bob Aufuldish, Aufuldish & Warinner
Edited by Alan Rapp
240 pp.; 11.5" x 11.5" hardcover with dustjacket
Published by Steidl
Publication date: Spring 2013
ISBN 978-3-86930-537-0

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 Maisel’s career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today. Maisel’s 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."

History’s Shadow

Photographs by David Maisel
Texts by Jonathan Lethem and David Maisel
72 pages, 43 color reproductions, 16" x 12", casebound
Published by Nazraeli Press
Publication Date: Fall 2011
ISBN 978-1-59005-278-4

Deluxe Edition
Publication Date: Spring 2012
ISBN 978-1-59005-288-4
This special edition of "History's Shadow", packaged with an original numbered and signed print in a clamshell box, is limited to 25 copies.

Maisel’s work has always been concerned with processes of memory, excavation, and transformation. These themes are given new form in his latest work, History’s Shadow. In this series, Maisel re-photographs x-rays from museum archives that depict artifacts from antiquity, scanning and digitally manipulating the selected source material. X-rays have historically been used by art conservators for structural examination of art and artifacts much as physicians examine bones and internal organs; they reveal losses, replacements, construction methods, and internal trauma invisible to the naked eye. By transcribing both the inner and outer surfaces of their subjects simultaneously, they form spectral images of indeterminate space, depth, and scale. The resulting photographs seem like transmissions from the distant past, both spanning and collapsing time. They express – through feeling and art, as well as science and reason – the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. The book contains an original short story by Jonathan Lethem that was inspired by Maisel’s images.

Library of Dust

Photographs by David Maisel
Essays by David Maisel, Geoff Manaugh, Michael Roth, Terry Toedtemeier
108 pages, 71 color reproductions, 17"x14", casebound
Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco
Publication Date: October 2008
ISBN 978-08118-6333-9

"Library of Dust, from the photographer David Maisel, may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before."

—from The New York Times, November 28, 2008

Cascade Effect

Photographs by David Maisel
Poem by Susan Stewart
16 pages, 8 color reproductions, and one original print
Casebound 5.75" x 7.5"
Nazraeli Press, One Picture Book No 49
Publication Date: Fall 2008
ISBN 978-1-59005-234-1

In this elegant volume, Nazraeli Press publishes images made by Maisel more than 20 years ago of clear-cut logging sites in Maine. The title refers to environmental crises triggered by extinctions within an ecosystem. This book is published in a limited edition of 500.

Oblivion

Photographs and text by David Maisel
Essay by William L. Fox
48 pp., 12”x12”, casebound
Published by Nazraeli Press, 2006
ISBN 1-59005-182-3

"The term “shadowland” that Maisel uses when discussing the Oblivion photographs is appropriate. When you cast a shadow on a fact, you create doubt. When you shadow someone, you follow them invisibly. Shadowland is what the military calls those blacked-out areas where they wish to operate unseen, whether they are testing an experimental aircraft or interrogating people beyond lawful means. It is a land of spies and spooks, a place where ghosts live, and what Los Angeles looks like in Oblivion. The city is almost recognizable in Maisel's negative prints and yet not quite, as if we are seeing both more of what we know and less."

—excerpted from Shadowlands, by William L. Fox

The Lake Project

Photographs and text by David Maisel
Introductory essay by Robert Sobieszek
56 pp., 14"x14"
Published by Nazraeli Press
ISBN 1-59005-071-1

This monograph is now sold out. To order the limited edition, which includes a book, an original signed print, and an especially designed clamshell box, please see www.nazraeli.com or call 1.503.281.3621

View images from The Lake Project
Read Maisel’s accompanying essay, Report from the Lake

The Lake Project was named one of the Top 25 Photography Books of 2004 by the Village Voice.

"As Mr. Maisel renders it, the lake, which has been drained over the last 90 years to green the lawns and ice the whiskies of Los Angeles, looks scourged and flayed...In Mr. Maisel’s photos, the vistas are majestic, terrifying, and weirdly beautiful. They seem more intimate than microscopic data, vaster than extraterrestrial space."

—from The New York Times, May 9, 2004

Terminal Mirage

Catalogue to gallery exhibitions
Essay by Anne Tucker
20 pages, 8" x 8"
14 color reproductions
Sold out

 

Additional Publications

Arrow denotes catalogue of exhibition

Diacritics. Johns Hopkins University Press. Volume 40, Number 1; 2012. Cover images and feature.
Elevating Western American Art. Denver, CO; Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver Art Museum, 2012. "On Entropology: The Vivid Waters of David Maisel and Robert Smithson", Messenheimer, Micah. Edited by Smith, Thomas Brent.
Hayden's Ferry Review. Arizona State University. Issue 50; Spring/Summer 2012. Cover image and feature.
Volume. The Netherlands; Issue 31, Archis 2012 #1. "Beauty of the Burden".
Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers' Essays. Daylight Community Arts Foundation 2012. Edited by Steacy, Will.
Paradigm Shifts. San Francisco Art Institute 2011. Edited by Hanru, Hou with Johnson, Mary Ellyn.
Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past. New York, NY; Columbia University Press, 2012. Roth, Michael.
SOME/THINGS Limited Edition Magazine. Issue 005: Paris, France, 2011. Interview by Thomson, Derek.
Altered Landscapes: Photographs of A Changing Environment. New York, NY; Skira/Rizzoli and the Nevada Museum of Art, 2011. Edited and with a foreword by Wolfe, Ann M.
Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment. Santa Fe, NM; Museum of New Mexico Press, 2011. Ware, Katherine.
Hiding Places: Memory in the Arts. Sheboygan, WI; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2011. Edited by Umberger, Leslie.
Trouble in Paradise: Examining Dischord Between Nature and Society. Casebound exhibition catalog for Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. February 28-June 28, 2009. Sasse, Julie; Handlin, Emily.
Water. New York, NY; teNeues Publishing Group; 2008. Prix Pictet 2008. Johnson, Leo: Hodgson, Francis.
The Map as Art. New York, NY; Princeton Architectural Press; 2009. Harmon, Katharine.
The BLDGBLOG Book. San Francisco, CA; Chronicle Books; 2009. Manaugh, Geoff.
Getty Research Journal. Los Angeles, CA; Number 1, 2009. "Voluptuousness Unease: David Maisel's Library of Dust". Lang, Karen.
Kerb Journal of Landscape Architecture. Australia; School of Architecture and Desgin, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Volume 17, 2008-2009. "Crisis in Landscape Representation". Bustamante, Cesar Torres.
Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl. Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press; 2006. San Jose Museum of Art and Center for American Places, co-publishers. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Wolfe, Ann.
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; University of California Press, 2005. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Selz, Peter.
Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate.Co-published by Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, and Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2005. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, MI. Baillargeon, Claude; Kennedy, Robert F. Jr., and Sutnik, Maia-Mari.
New Turf.Catalogue to exhibition at the Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, July-October 2005. Hankins, Evelyn.
Nieman Reports. “Water: A Life Force Harnessed as News.” Cover image. Spring 2005.
Blue Sky 04/05. Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, catalogue of 2004 exhibitions.
Paradise Paved. Catalogue to exhibition at the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, PA. April-May 2005.
Traces and Omens. Stichting Aurora Borealis, Groningen, Netherlands, in association with Noorderlicht Festival, 2005. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Noorderlicht Festival, Groningen, Netherlands. Mellis, Wim.
Zyzzyva. San Francisco, Volume XXI, Number 2, Fall 2005.
No Man’s Land: Contemporary Photographers and Fragile Ecologies. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, 2004. Sloan, Mark.
Robert Smithson.Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; University of California Press, 2004. Contributed several images of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Tsai, Cornelia and Butler, Connie.
Celebrating Water, Fotofest H2004. Fotofest catalogue for exhibition of “The Lake Project” and works by other artists, 2004.
Dirt Press, a journal of contemporary arts and literature. New York and San Francisco, Dirt Press. Issue 1.4, June 2004.
The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning. Catalogue accompanying exhibition; published by International Museum of Photography, Rochester, NY. Sobieszek, Robert.