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.
David Maisel
I live in the 20th century. I have copper rivets on my jeans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the feeling of being kind of overwhelmed is almost part of the aesthetic of the work.
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.
