David Maisel

The Great Salt Lake in Utah, the site of the aerial photographs that comprise the Terminal Mirage project, is a “terminal” lake, meaning that it has no natural outlets. This physical property results in the Lake’s exceptional richness in sodium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, and other elements — many of which are common to traditional photographic chemistry.

Some 40,000 acres of commercially operated evaporation ponds surround the Great Salt Lake’s perimeter, formed to extract these minerals from its waters for industrial use. These grids of human-made ponds become a labyrinth laid over the surface of the Lake and its shoreline.

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.