David Maisel Limited Edition Prints for Radius Books

The Lake Project comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to the fledgling desert city of Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid landscape.

Today, this site is highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, as fierce winds dislodge microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water yields blooms of microscopic bacteria, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map.

Desolation Desert focuses on the massive mining operations in Chile's vast Atacama Desert. The highest and driest desert on the planet, this sensitive eco-region is being transformed at an unparalleled pace and scale by extractive industries, mining its copper and lithium reserves. Maisel’s aerial images of these sites are abstract, graphic, and painterly — offering viewers detailed, open-ended information that operates on a metaphorical level as much as a documentary one.

As the artist shares, "These images of the Atacama are intended to counter our collective misapprehension of the desert as a terra incognita, a vast emptiness upon which we impose a notion of purity and boundlessness. Forming part of an alternative cartography that maps industrial development beyond the city limits, these new photographs show how the supposedly remote Atacama Desert is becoming part of a planetary fabric of urbanization, and at what cost."

Climate scientists from Brigham Young University recently warned that if emergency measures are not enacted immediately, Utah’s Great Salt Lake could disappear by 2028. Maisel's newest body of work, Spiraling offers an aerial perspective on this environmental crisis.

The artist first began photographing in the region nearly 40 years ago, drawn to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and photographing its landscape in his series Black Maps (1988) and Terminal Mirage (2003).  Gravely impacted by climate change and reshaped by mining toxins and agricultural runoff, the lake’s size has since diminished by more than two-thirds.