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David Maisel
Terminal Mirage
Feb 28, 2023

Overview
"Inspired by Robert Smithson’s writings on the Great Salt Lake, this project examines the periphery of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, including zones of mineral evaporation ponds and macabre industrial pollution covering some 40,000 acres along the lake's shores."
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Details
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. 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.