The Mining Project: The Otherworldly Landscapes of America’s Most Toxic Sites Photographer Dav
The Mining Project: The Otherworldly Landscapes of America’s Most Toxic Sites Photographer David Maisel’s work often focuses on the landscapes that have been transformed by industrial activity. Through aerial images, he has captured sites like Lake Owens, the dustiest place in the United States; forests uprooted by “whole-tree harvesters”; and borox mines. For his series The Mining Project, Maisel explored open pit mines across the United States which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, have become our largest source of toxic pollution. The photos above are all from the Berkeley Mine in Butte, Montana, whose open pit is filled with severely poisoned water a mile deep and nine hundred feet wide. The Its bizarre terrains could almost be mistaken for distant nebula, tropical beaches, or Martian landscapes. Yet their surreal beauty also underscores their unnatural alterations, transformations in which we, as consumers, are complicit. As Maisel notes, “our infrastructure, our technology, our transportation systems, and even the medium of photography itself, are all reliant on metals extracted from the Earth’s crust in methods both brutal and complex.” Indeed, the energy—and the means by which we produce and consume it—which supports modern society is often hidden. By literally making it visible, Maisel offers viewers a way to understand and these processes. -- source link
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