ENVIRONMENTAL ECOLOGY

The Lake Project

David Maisel's riveting aerial photography series called The Lake Project shows the undoing of the natural world by wide-scaled human activity. The depictions of these damaged wastelands, where our collective efforts have eradicated the natural order, are both spectacular and horrifying.

Maisel began The Lake Project in 2001. His abstract, painterly-like images depict Owens Lakeóthe site of a formerly 200-square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River water was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid stretch of land.

In The Lake Project, the lake has become the locus of waterís absence, a negation of itselfóa void. Yet its inherent beauty has been subjugated by its use, resulting in otherworldly planes of poison in hues of red, green, amber, and turquoise. There is a sense of both seduction and beauty in these images as they serve to transcribe an archetypal space of destruction and ruin that mirrors the darker corners of our consciousness.

Maisel is in the preliminary stages of planning an observation tower to be constructed at the edge of the Owens Lake Flood Zone, and a pedestrian bridge to cross the deepest part of the remnants of Owens Lake, where the blooms of bacteria stain the water red. Much in the same manner as Robert Smithsonís viewing platform proposals (which were to be erected at the bottom of abandoned open pit mines), Maisel thinks that we need to engage with these sites of environmental disaster and collapse on a physical, as well as pictorial, level. 

David Maisel

David Maisel is a photographer and visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay area. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. His artwork is represented in major public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Maiselís photographs have been featured in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His first book, The Lake Project, was published by Nazraeli Press in 2004, and was selected as one of the Top 25 Photography Books of that year by the critic Vince Aletti. Maiselís second book, Oblivion, was published by Nazraeli Press in Fall 2006.  

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