David Maisel: Terminal Mirage

This series is a major chapter of my Black Maps project, in which I utilize an aerial perspective to photograph radically altered terrain that has undergone extreme environmental transformation; they show us evidence of our Anthropocene Era.

The abstraction in these topographic images conjures mid-century modernism and color field painting, in particular the work of Rothko, Diebenkorn, and Frankenthaler. That parallel is intentional, as I am interested in revealing how landscape contains and reflects the goals and impulses of the past century’s modernist quest.

Looking down onto these zones, where human activity has replaced the natural order, what I see is at once seductively beautiful and terrible. The images in Terminal Mirage are intended to expand our notions of what constitutes landscape and landscape art in this era of the post-natural world.