David Maisel
Artist statement
The Lake Project and Terminal Mirage are
two chapters in my extensive photographic
series called Black Maps, which consists of my
aerial photographs of environmentally impacted
landscapes. These images depict the undoing of
the natural world by wide-scaled human activity.
The pictures of these damaged wastelands,
where our collective efforts have eradicated
the natural order, are both spectacular and
horrifying. The forms of environmental disquiet
and degradation function on both a documentary
and a metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective
enables the viewer to experience the landscape
like a vast map of its own undoing.
The Lake Project consists of my aerial
photographs from the site of Owens Lake,
a formerly 250-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, some two hundred miles to the south.
By 1926, the lake was essentially depleted,
exposing vast mineral flats and transforming
a fertile valley into an arid playa. In the ensuing
decades, fierce winds have scoured microscopic
particles from the lakebed, creating extensive
carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the lakebed
has become the highest source of particulate
matter pollution in the United States, emitting
some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium,
chromium, arsenic and other materials. The
concentration of minerals in the little water
remaining in Owens Lake is so artificially
high that blooms of microscopic bacterial
organisms result, turning the liquid a deep,
bloody red.
In Terminal Mirage, my aerial images of the
Great Salt Lake in Utah become a means to
explore “the disturbingly engaging duality
between beauty and repulsion”, as the curator
Anne Tucker has written about this series. The
Great Salt Lake is, indeed a ‘terminal’ lake –
it has no natural outlets – and this physical
property results in the lake’s exceptional
richness in sodium, magnesium, potassium,
chloride, sulphate, and other elements.
Commercially operated evaporation ponds
ring the lake’s perimeter, in order to extract
these minerals from the lake for industrial use.
The nearby Tooele Army Depot (depicted in
my penultimate photograph submitted from
this series) is, however, the site of many of the
nation’s aging chemical weapons, housed in
thousands of storage ‘igloos’. These weapons are
periodically incinerated on site, sending
contaminated ash over the waters of the
Great Salt Lake, which is then – disturbingly,
inexplicably – mined for its mineral content.
