David Maisel

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. ”

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. ”

That experience of being at Mt. St. Helen's was really formative. I don't even know if I'd be a photographer. It was an essential moment for me. ”

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. ”

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. ”

I think the feeling of being kind of overwhelmed is almost part of the aesthetic of the work. ”

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. ”