David Maisel: Aerial Witness to Earth’s Transformation

An appreciation by Mike Savage

David Maisel occupies a unique position in contemporary photography—hovering between artist, documentarian, and environmental witness. For over three decades, he has photographed the planet from above, creating images that are simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, abstract and urgently real. 

His work asks us to consider our relationship with the Earth at a moment when that relationship has become critical. He’s long been a favorite, admired photographer of mine. I began collecting his work decades ago, and they remain some of my most favorite and most interesting pieces that I own. 

Let me share the things that I’ve come to know about David as we dive deeper into his background and his art. 

Early Life and Formation

Born in New York in 1961, Maisel grew up during a period of increasing environmental consciousness in America. He studied history and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University, where he developed an interdisciplinary approach that would define his career. This wasn’t just training in photography—it was an education in how to see systems, patterns, and the intersection of human activity with natural processes.

Maisel later pursued graduate studies in photography at California College of the Arts, but his real education came from spending time in the air. He began chartering small planes and helicopters, positioning himself thousands of feet above landscapes that bore the marks of human intervention. This aerial perspective became his signature, allowing him to reveal patterns invisible from the ground.

The Terminal Mirage and Owens Lake

One of Maisel’s most powerful bodies of work is “The Terminal Mirage,” created over 14 years documenting Owens Lake in California. Once a vibrant body of water, Owens Lake was drained in the early 20th century to supply water to Los Angeles via the Los Angeles Aqueduct. What remained became the largest single source of dust pollution in North America—a toxic, desiccated lakebed that generated massive dust storms.

Maisel’s photographs of Owens Lake don’t look like an environmental disaster. They look like paintings—swirls of rust, copper, burgundy, and gold created by mineral deposits and the DWP’s dust mitigation efforts. The images are seductive, their terrible beauty forcing viewers to reckon with the aesthetics of destruction. This tension is central to Maisel’s practice: he creates gorgeous images of ecological catastrophe, asking us to look closely at what we’d prefer to ignore.

Black Maps: Mining America

In “Black Maps,” Maisel turned his lens to open-pit mines across the American West. These vast excavations—for copper, gold, and other minerals—create wounds in the earth visible from space. Maisel’s photographs transform them into something else: dark, abstract compositions that resemble ink paintings or charcoal drawings.

The series title references both the literal darkness of the depleted earth and the idea of mapping territories of loss. Shot primarily in black and white, these images strip away the colorful distractions that might make mining operations look benign. What remains is stark evidence of extraction at an almost incomprehensible scale. The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, the Berkeley Pit in Montana—these sites become, in Maisel’s images, both specific places and metaphors for how we consume the planet.

The Artistic Approach

Maisel’s style is characterized by radical abstraction achieved through utterly realistic means. He doesn’t manipulate his images digitally to make them more abstract—the abstraction is inherent in the perspective and scale. By photographing from high altitudes, he removes familiar reference points. Roads become lines, toxic pools become color fields, and mountains of tailings become sculptural forms.

His prints are often large-scale, some measuring several feet across, which creates an immersive viewing experience. Standing before one of Maisel’s photographs, viewers find themselves oscillating between recognition and disorientation. The eye searches for a way into the image, trying to understand what it’s seeing, and in that searching comes comprehension—this is what we’ve done.

Color plays a crucial role in his work. The vivid, often unnatural hues in series like “The Terminal Mirage” aren’t enhanced—they’re real, the result of chemical processes, mineral concentrations, and algae blooms. This reality makes them more disturbing. Beauty becomes evidence.

Environmental Art and Activism

While Maisel resists being labeled purely as an environmental activist, his work undeniably serves that function. By making invisible processes visible and by presenting them with formal beauty, he creates a complicated emotional and intellectual experience for viewers. We’re attracted to the images aesthetically, which creates an opening for the harder questions they pose.

This approach distinguishes him from traditional documentary photography. He’s not showing us suffering people or dead wildlife—he’s showing us systems, long-term processes, and the cumulative effects of resource extraction. The horror is in the scale and the abstraction itself, in realizing that these patterns represent actual places where earth has been permanently altered.

Library of Dust

Not all of Maisel’s work focuses on landscapes. In “Library of Dust,” he photographed thousands of corroded copper canisters containing the unclaimed remains of psychiatric patients at Oregon State Hospital. The containers, stored for decades in a basement, had developed extraordinary patinas—blooming greens, blues, and rust that transformed each canister into an accidental artwork.

This series connects to his landscape work thematically: both explore what happens over time when human systems break down or are abandoned. The forgotten patients and the drained lake share a similar fate—relegated to sites of containment and neglect. Even here, Maisel finds devastating beauty in the evidence of loss.

Legacy and Influence

David Maisel’s influence extends beyond photography into conversations about climate change, resource management, and how art can address environmental crisis. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

His approach has inspired other artists to use aerial perspective and abstraction to address environmental themes. But more importantly, his photographs have helped shape how we visualize ecological damage. In an era of climate crisis, his images provide a vocabulary for seeing and discussing transformation at planetary scale.

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David Maisel’s photographs occupy an uncomfortable but necessary space in contemporary art. They’re too beautiful to be pure documentation, too accurate to be pure aesthetics. They demand that we look at what we’re doing to the Earth, but they seduce us into looking through beauty rather than shocking us into attention.

This might be his greatest achievement: creating images that people want to see, that they find compelling and even sublime, while those same images document our most destructive behaviors. In doing so, Maisel has developed a visual language for the Anthropocene—the age in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping the planet.

His work reminds us that the Earth’s wounds are also, in a terrible way, our creations. And creation, even destructive creation, carries with it a dark aesthetic power that demands recognition.

ABOUT SAVAGE 

Michael Savage of New Canaan, CT is the Founder of 1-800Accountant that helps businesses with their accounting services and needs through cutting-edge technology and customer support.