Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime named to the “Best Books of 2013” by Brain Pickings.
“For nearly three decades, photographer and visual artist David Maisel — whose gloriously haunting Library of Dust project you might recall from a few years back — has been transforming landscape photography with his stunning aerial images exploring the relationship between Earth and humanity. Now, the best of them are collected in the magnificent monograph Black Maps: American Landscape and he Apocalyptic Sublime — a lavish large-format tome featuring more than 100 of Maisel’s surreally entrancing portraits of our worldly reality, at once beautiful and tragic. From cyanide-leaching ponds to open-pit mines to the sprawl of urbanization, Maisel’s mesmerizing photographs — which, without context, could be mistaken as much for abstract impressionism as they could for cellular microscopy — capture fragments of the landscape that “correspond to the structure of human thought and feeling.”