“Anthropologists say that to learn about a civilization, look at what it leaves behind. Photographer David Maisel, a one-time student of Emmet Gowin, adheres to that credo. Unlike anthropologists who analyze physical evidence on the ground, Maisel makes photographs of the Earth from airplanes, and the geochemical haloes he commits to film – residues of the industrial processes that fuel the human market economy – yield a strange, beguiling kind of forensic evidence. That evidence, seen in seven iconic pictures made between 1989 and 2018, forms a type of planetary autopsy: a portrait of humankind’s ravenous appetites and their consequences”.
November 13, 2023
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