Oblivion

Oblivion continues David Maisel's long-running practice of photographing landscapes transformed by human intervention from the air, here turning his camera on Los Angeles itself rather than a mine or reservoir. Shot from directly above the city, the fifteen aerial images render the freeway interchanges, subdivisions, and commercial sprawl of Los Angeles as a dense, near-abstract pattern, with tonalities reversed so the images read as negatives, black skies and white ground. The effect is at once beautiful and unsettling, a metropolis stripped of scale and specificity until it resembles a body under diagnostic imaging. The book opens with Mark Strand's poem "Black Maps" and closes with an essay by William L. Fox, "Shadowlands," both engaging with the disorientation and dystopian undertone of Maisel's aerial vantage. Designed by Bob Aufuldish and published by Nazraeli Press in association with The Joy of Giving Something, Inc., in an edition of 1000, Oblivion sits alongside other Maisel aerial-landscape monographs including The Lake Project and Library of Dust.