A High Regard For the Earth

David Maisel's Aerial Photos Re-Survey the Boundaries Between Ugly and Beautiful

Gallery
Earth From on High
With his aerial photographs, David Maisel captures "environmentally impacted landscapes" and imbues them with the time-honored beauty of abstract art. "Black Maps," an exhibition of 14 of these large-scale photographs, is on view at the National Academy of Science from Sept. 4 until Dec. 5.

You're an artist, and you want to make images that change the world, or at least point a finger at its troubles. For a decade or more, the way to do that has been to avoid a distracting, obviously arty look. Instead, there's been an almost documentary approach: Think Nan Goldin's hugely influential snapshots of down-and-outers in New York. Of course, if your images succeed, before too long they become the model for a whole new look in art, and beyond: Think how Goldin's images resonated through the art world in the 1990s, then out into the worlds of fashion and advertising.

You could call this the "ugly-is-beautiful" approach to getting your point across.

The eco-themed images of David Maisel, a 46-year-old photographer based in Sausalito, Calif., carve space out for themselves by resisting that now standard way of making pictures talk. Sixteen of them, all four foot square, go on display Tuesday in the Rotunda Gallery at the National Academy of Sciences.

Maisel's photos also start out with the most straightforward documentary viewpoint: They're shot looking down from a small plane or helicopter onto sites of man-made degradation, using standard equipment and film. They show dying lakes, clear-cut forests and the tailing ponds and leaching fields of mines, laid out flat and clear before our eyes. But the crucial thing is that the images Maisel ends up with also look like appealing, time-honored abstract art.

A picture of the bacterial bloom on a slick of poisoned water in Owens Lake, drained almost a century ago to supply Los Angeles, has the throbbing black-tinged reds of a Rothko -- one painted not long, maybe, before the artist's suicide in 1970. A picture of the edge of Great Salt Lake has the desiccated browns and blacks of a 1950s abstraction by Franz Kline. A cheerier-looking Utah picture, in fact showing massive evaporation ponds, defines a yellow chevron that could almost be by Kenneth Noland, maybe from just after he left Washington in 1961.

You could call this the "beautiful-is-ugly" move. The photos attract us with their tried-and-true ideas of beauty. Then hit us with their subject's ugliness.

It's easy to get these pictures wrong, I think. They can come across, at first, as just the latest in a long line of modernist art that starts out in the mess of the everyday, then pulls an elegant composition out of it. At the beginning of last century, modern pioneers such as Kazimir Malevich actually used real aerial photographs as inspiration for their reality-free abstractions. By the later 1920s, at the Bauhaus, even photographers were using a view down from on high as a way of pushing reality toward pure pattern and line. At its most extreme, that tendency led to elegant photos that were all about the way they looked and hardly at all about the things they showed.

That's not what's going on with Maisel, I think. Sure, his images look fine. But purely as images, they retread well-trodden ground. It's only when we look at them as images of something -- of something that matters, deeply -- that they start standing out.

There are things about Maisel and his art that make that way of looking harder than it might be. Maisel's got a Web site full of advertising photos that are as emptily elegant as the corporate goods they celebrate. It makes you wonder if in fact slick looks might be enough for him. Will he use modern elegance to attract anyone to anything?

And in his officially "artistic" exhibitions, Maisel doesn't let you know the real subject of each of his pictures. You have to visit a separate "fine-art" Web site he maintains to know just what you're looking at, and even then he keeps things rather vague.

It's as though Maisel himself is still caught up in the tired old idea that an artist's job (more like a hobby, maybe, on top of his commercial work) is to find the lovely in the world, wherever he can find it. Yet his pictures know better: They know that, in our time, good looks only truly matter when they're used to speak of things beyond themselves. Even -- especially -- when they're talking about ugliness.

Black Maps: Photographs by David Maisel is on Sept. 4 through Dec. 5 in the Rotunda Gallery of the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave. NW. Call 202-334-2436 or visit http://www.nationalacademies.org/arts and http://www.davidmaisel.com.

PHOTO GALLERY: Maisel's Environmental Images