Design
Grotesquely Polluted Landscapes ... or Beautiful Art?
Photographer David Maisel has a knack for capturing the beauty and the horror of contaminated mines and toxic lakes.
In an ideal world, there would be no burned-up lakes or horrifically denuded strip mines and David Maisel would be out of a job.
Environmental damage on the epic scale has become Maisel's bread and butter ever since the photographer started chronicling blighted mining sites in the 1980s. Typically working from inside a Cessna airplane, he's shot brilliantly colored but cyanide-stricken "leaching fields" in Southwest mines, the befouled lands around a Utah magnesium company that the EPA sued for hazardous waste and a huge lake that's been sucked into a dry, toxic dust-spewing desert by the people of Los Angeles.