“To the Ends of the Earth,” Cover image by David Maisel. October 2004. Crump, James.
“In its nascency, aerial photography held out the potential for use in the surveillance of specific sites and territories. David Maisel has for the last 20 years been photographing the locations of tailing ponds and former lakes, creating luminous abstractions noteworthy for their super-saturated colour. His most recent series, collected in the book The Lake Project (2004), reveals amorphous details of California Lake beds, polluted from mining, development and agriculture, or dried up due to the notorious mismanagement of water in Southern California. These vertiginous pictures bring to mind Adam Fuss’s trippy photograms of rabbit entrails and cow liver, and they also possess a disturbing science-fiction quality, as if civilisation were on the brink of extinction.”
Read the entire review here.