David Maisel
American, 1961
Lake Project #9802-4, 2001-2002
chromogenic development print
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by PhotoFutures
2003.76
Maisel in Paris, 2008
Within The Lake Project, the choice to number his photographs was deliberate. Maisel chose to use numbers to “take the focus away from fixing blame for the degradation of Owens Lake and put it on the hallucinogenic power of the images.”
“The view of Owens Valley from above is at once terrifying and exalted. These are precisely the contradictions that Maisel pursues in his work, seeking out vast reaches of land that might be further transformed by the abstraction of the camera and the disorienting perspective of the plane. The elevation serves as a compositional device … Maisel is assembling a map from numerous vantage points, piecing together the complex overlay of human intervention, natural systems, and the inherent chaos and logic that inform them both.” - David Maisel
RESEARCH PAPER
Some art becomes much more powerful when it is put in its historical or environmental context. David Maisel’s Lake Project #9802-4 is one such work. When you first look at this photograph you see an abstract landscape. Geometric lines and colors give a simple, quiet beauty to the scene. It’s only after you learn that the subject of the photograph is an environmental disaster that you begin to understand the true nature of the work and the meaning the artist is trying to convey.
David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from the California College of the Arts. Maisel has also studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in many permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angels County Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Maisel has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1993.
Maisel’s work has primarily focused on significant manmade environmental degradation. His work is an ongoing multi-episodic story that utilizes a series of large-scale photographs to draw attention to some of the world’s worst environmental disasters. The Lake Project , of which Lake Project #9802-4 , 2001-2002 is one image, is one such episode. He frequently photographs from the air because of the remoteness of the affected sites; however the approach also effectively illustrates the size of the impacted areas.
The history of the Owens Valley is one of California’s great environmental disasters. Beginning in 1913 the city of Los Angeles began to divert water from Owens Lake, located on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. This diversion was done to provide a substantial portion of Los Angeles’ water supply. By 1926 Owens Lake and the lower section of the Owens River were dry. During subsequent decades this dry lakebed became the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States. This dust or “Keeler fog” (named for the small town on the east side of the lake) was extremely toxic containing carcinogens such as nickel, cadmium and arsenic as well as trace amounts of other harmful substances. A year after Maisel took The Lake Project photographs, the City of Los Angeles, as part of an air quality mitigation settlement with the EPA, began remediation efforts to decrease the amount of dust blowing off of the dry lakebed. While dust pollution has lessened, most of the water from the basin still flows to Los Angeles.
Maisel photographed the Owens Valley for The Lake Project in September 2001 and again in June 2002. The photographs were taken with a Hasselblad camera utilizing a Zeiss lens while flying in a Cessna four-seater aircraft at approximately two miles in altitude. The Hasselblad produced a six centimeter by six centimeter original image. The artwork itself was made by using a chromogenic development print process utilizing Fuji Crystal Archive paper. The chromogenic print is prepared by using “photographic paper that has three silver emulsion layers sensitized to the primary additive colors of light. During the developing process, dye couplers bond with the exposed and developed silver halides to produce complementary subtractive color dyes. The silver is bleached away, leaving a full-color positive image.” Fuji Crystal Archive paper is the best choice for printing color pictures if longevity is important and it is for Maisel.
Manmade structures sit atop a deeply wounded landscape. Geometric lines in the midst of amorphous shapes and planes of orange, and white, and blue cause the mind to create form. Some people see a smoking gun in the abstract patterns on the ground; however Maisel’s work is not generally so symbolic. Though an apropos metaphor, this pattern is more likely an artifact of our minds desire to impose order on chaos once we realize the topic of this work. In this photograph Maisel is interested in “the ways that abstraction dovetails with content – much as the Nazca Lines in Peru are a kind of drawing on the earth.”
Maisel uses abstraction, composition and perspective to create a contrast between beauty and revulsion. His intent is to utilize the contradictions and conflicting emotions we feel to enhance our involvement, and hence our understanding, of the scene he has photographed. Maisel intends for the viewers to feel a tension when they finally understand all of the facets of the work they are viewing; the history, the environment, the beauty, the horror and loss for what once was. David Maisel’s images are thought provoking and cause the viewer to ask fundamental questions about the truth and beauty we observe in the world.
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Douglas S. McElwain, Sept. 19, 2009
Bibliography
David Maisel, Email to author, September 19, 2009.
“Hell from the Air: California’s Toxic Landscape,” The New York Times, New York, May 9,
2004.
http://www.davidmaisel.com/works/picture.asp?cat=lak&tl=the%20lake%20project, March 3, 2009.
http://www.geh.org/taschen/htmlsrc/glossary.html, March 6, 2009.
http://www.wilhelm-research.com, September 20, 2009.