The Unforgettable, Unforgiving Reality of Man-Altered Landscapes

San Francisco based photographer David Maisel has captured a vast array of impossibly surreal landscape images that depict the condition that humans consistently leave our natural environment in once we extract what we want.

For twenty years, he has tiptoed within the veil of military testing operations, logging, water reclamation projects and strip mining – all of which are normally highly shrouded – by obtaining photographic documentation of their consequences while hovering high in the sky.

The result of his efforts tends to border on abstract art due to the stark contrast between organic terrain and human-imposed wreckage (such as chemical or mineral seepage), but rather than being plucked from some cautionary sci-fi tale, Maisel says that his photos explore a very real “contemporary oblivion” that is both museum-worthy and positively shameful.

Terminal Mirage (above) captures the colorfully polluted face of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the result of a curious combination of deadly toxins and naturally occurring elements that yield an abstract impressionistic art piece that is both magnetic in its beauty and off-putting in its destruction.

Ever wonder what happens when vast swaths of forests are felled? In northern Maine, a “whole tree harvester” makes child’s play of the process of uprooting nature’s carbon sinks, leaving a sad graveyard of clear cut zones behind (as can be seen in these two side-by-side black and white photographs).

In an arid section of southeastern California called Owens Valley, this is what happened when man began to divert all naturally-occurring water supplies from that region into the Los Angeles Aqueduct back in 1913.

Without considering the consequences of their actions quite carefully enough, they ended up exposing a mineral rich underlying salt flat that contained seriously hazardous carcinogenic particles which ultimately whipped through the air (due to the inherent high winds in that area), disbursing micro-particulates not just on top of local cropland and soil but also inside people’s lungs.

Appropriately enough, it looks as if man’s bloodletting of the region is manifesting itself in full grotesque glory.

The EPA’s stabilization plan – designed to mitigate the cancerous dust that has been raining down on residents of the region for multiple decades now – involved incorporating shallow flooding and salt grass cultivation along with the application of a liberal layer of gravel…what an eyesore.

Will we ever learn? Judging from Maisel’s 20+ year history documenting environmental desecration, it seems as though he has a constantly replenishing well of subject matter to draw on.