David Maisel Quotes
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The active and abandoned tailings ponds I have photographed, for example, are strangely beautiful - yet they are also chock full of cyanide, which is used in the recovery of microscopic particles of gold from the waste tailings of copper mines.
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I live in the 20th century. I have copper rivets on my jeans.
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It was only after a while, after photographing mines and clear-cutting of forests in Maine, that I realized I was looking at the components of photography itself. Photography uses paper made from trees, water, metals, and chemistry. In a way, I was looking at all these things that feed into photography.
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I started as a black and white photographer, but the colors I was seeing were just so lurid and compelling and awful at the same time. They got me looking at other contemporary art. I was gravitating more and more toward work that had visceral power, that wasn't necessarily about being beautiful but had some kind of horror in the palette.
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The resulting prints of 'History's Shadow' make the invisible visible and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us.
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With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.
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I still shoot film. I like what film does, how it renders things, Also, when I'm shooting from the air, I want to have as large a negative as I can.
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The thing that struck me most about the Mount St. Helens project was not the devastation of the eruption, but the logging industry - the earth transformed on that scale by humans.