View from the Precipice

Survey of Works 1983-2026
© David Maisel

View from the Precipice, a retrospective monograph spanning Maisel's entire career, begins with a comprehensive index of his projects from 1983 to 2026 that includes both extensive information about each body of work and insights into their development in the artist's own words. This chronology is followed by a lyrically sequenced plate section that draws formal and conceptual connections across bodies of work, decades of time, and photography and painting—the two mediums in which Maisel most commonly works. In addition to writing by the artist, View from the Precipice also includes newly commissioned essays by Alexander Nemerov and Geoff Manaugh alongside a transcribed conversation between Maisel and author Samantha Harvey that focuses on, among other things, the visual and psychological perspective afforded by the aerial vantage point.

click to view the complete set of images in the archive

Known for his aerial photographs chronicling the complex relationships between natural systems and human intervention, David Maisel's images often initially appear abstract and painterly, offering detailed but open-ended visual information that operates as both documentary and metaphor. Their strange beauty has been referred to as “the apocalyptic sublime.”

The urban dweller of Southern California now exists in what Mike Davis terms “the fastest growing metropolis in the western world, with a built-up surface area nearly the size of Ireland, and a GNP bigger than India’s.” Themes of development as a self-generating, self-replicating force that exists outside of nature are encoded in the photographs in Oblivion, which view the empire of Los Angeles as both a specific site and as a more generalized condition.

The inversion of tonalities in these works de-familiarizes the images. It also subtly refers to other ways of imaging — like the x-ray, which sees within the structure of an organism or body — or other modes of seeing — like the flickering negative images in an atomic blast, when the shadow world is revealed and released.

From above, in these aerial views, we see encrypted within the city’s code the elements of our own vulnerability. The images describe a potentially desecrated urban fabric, even as they transcribe the commonplace. The city’s circuitry becomes a day-for-night version of reality; the water seems made of metal, the city made of ash.

Legislation governing mining activity in the United States dates from over 135 years ago. The 1872 Mining Law was ratified in an era when this country sought to develop the West and exploit natural resources without regard to environmental consequences. As a legacy of this antiquated law, more than a century of mining has left the West deeply scarred. Modern mining techniques carve out entire mountains and utilize tons of toxic chemicals at massive industrial sites. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, mining is the country's largest source of toxic pollution.
With these sites, I have found subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics. The active and abandoned tailings ponds I have photographed, for example, are strangely beautiful~ yet they are also chock full of cyanide, which is used in the recovery of microscopic particles of gold from the waste tailings of copper mines.

These photographs depict the landscape of the American West as the site of human-induced trauma. Rather than a condemnation of a specific industry, however, my images are intended as an aesthetic response to such despoiled landscapes. These sites are the contemplative gardens of our time, places that offer the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society. The photographer Walker Evans spoke of the “enchantment of the aesthetically rejected subject.” Similarly, I recognize that strip mines, tailings ponds, cyanide leaching fields, and other such zones form a toxic, yet strangely compelling, terra incognita. I am interested in the cartographic powers of photography, and in making an art of the actual, that renders the uncompromising realities of a flawed, complex world.

David Maisel: View from the Precipice (Survey of Works 1983-2026)
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