Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime

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David Maisel

Steidl, Göttingen, 2013, English

Nonfiction, Photography

1.2 x 11.7 x 11.5 inches, hardcover, 240 pages

ISBN: 9783869305370

Suggested Retail Price: $85.00

From the Publisher. Black Maps is the first in-depth survey of the major aerial projects by David Maisel, whose images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. In more than 100 photos that span Maisel’s career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today.

Maisel’s images of environmentally impacted sites consider the aesthetics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, rampant urbanization and sprawl, and zones of water reclamation. These surreal and disquieting photos take us towards the margins of the unknown and as the Los Angeles Times has stated, “argue for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.”

Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition David Maisel--black maps: American landscape and the apocalyptic sublime, organized by the CU Boulder Art Museum at the University of Colorado.

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