David Maisel is an exponent of aerial photography who documents American landscapes from a birds-eye view, revealing the context of abstract environments severely impacted by human intervention.he images are often paired with descriptive text which connects the tragic environmental context to its surprising visual equivalent. Inspired by the writings of Robert Smithson, Maisel says that he:

began to consider my pictures ... not as simply documents, but as poetic renderings that might engender contemplation of these sites and what they mean to us. In this work, and in work produced in subsequent years, I seek to frame the complexities of an environmentally impacted landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor, beauty and despair.

The history of this region is the stuff of California legend: a story of engineers, politicians, and big land owners working together to divert water to the rapidly growing desert city of Los Angeles, generating a thriving agricultural industry and an environmental disaster in the process.

Diana Gaston in 'Immaculate Destruction: David Maisel's Lake Project' in Aperture, Volume 172 states:

Beginning in 1913, the now infamous Los Angeles reclamation project effectively diverted water from Owens Valley to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, providing a substantial amount of the city’s water supply. By 1926, the lower Owens River and Owens Lake were essentially depleted of water, leaving a vast exposed salt flat with unusually concentrated mineral levels and extremely vulnerable topsoil. The situation has been exacerbated by fierce winds that sweep through the valley and dislodge carcinogenic particles from the lakebed, creating a pervasive dust cloud known as the Keeler fog (named for the town on the east side of the lake). The Owens Lake region, the largest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, is now undergoing an EPA approved, state implemented plan to control the spread of this hazardous matter. After decades of accelerated destruction, the ground is once again flooded, this time by EPA officials in an effort to diminish the toxic dust that settles in the soil, vegetation, and lungs of nearby inhabitants. From the air, high above this damaged wasteland, the ground assembles itself into something spectacular and horrifying. This is what David Maisel sees through his camera, a contemporary version of the sublime.

With each successive layer of intervention, the landscape becomes more complex. Previous scars are covered over, and cycles of negation and erasure expand into a grid system overlaid on the barren lake. From the air, a new map emerges.

The Lake Project, as the Owens Lake pictures have come to be known, is part of a larger, ongoing series loosely titled Black Maps. The early thinking for this series actually began during his undergraduate work at Princeton, when he accompanied his photography professor Emmet Gowin on flights over Mount Saint Helens and the heavily logged forests of the Pacific Northwest. The experience of that aerial view, and the realization that the overwhelming destruction of the logging industry was essentially on par with the damage brought about by a volcanic eruption, established his future direction as a photographer.