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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” 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 photographs 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.”

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.
240 pp.; 11.5″ x 11.5″ hardcover with dustjacket
Published by Steidl
Publication date: Spring 2013
ISBN 978-3-86930-537-

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