In 2003, photographer David Maisel “began to make aerial photographs around the perimeter of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as part of a project that will ultimately cover much of the Great Basin. The Great Salt Lake is considered a ‘terminal’ lake, in that it has no naturally occurring outlets. Around its edges are industries of varying types, including evaporation ponds that cover some 40,000 acres along the eastern and southern shores of the lake.”
Accordingly, all photographs in this post are by Maisel – but his work is so ridiculously great, and so retina-scarringly colorful, that I have to urge you in the strongest possible terms to go check it out. (Just look at these! And these! And these! I’m going crazy here! They’re so beautiful you might have a heart attack).
(And don’t forget BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at the literary hydrologies of silt and other drainscapes).
BEAUTIFUL!
you can almost smell the sulphur… amazing shots.
(/pretentious liberal arts student on)
They are heart-achingly beautiful, a reminder of the strange fact that we are wired to feel pleasure simply from seeing things. Why do I feel this way when I look at these pictures? They bear no relationship to faces or food or the natural world or the female form… I wish I understood the mechanism behind the response. I remember hours as a kid staring at mathematics-based screensavers twisting and undulating on computer screens, at fractals slowly rendering themselves, at the interesecting echoes of raindrops on dark winter puddles. Why we have a perception of beauty, and what rules govern it are difficult questions. In a way I wish I could do experiments and derive rules to model the phenomenon. In a way I hope it’s not explained in my lifetime. I’d rather the generation of this reaction was still an art rather than a science, and that a few of the buttons in my brain remained a pleasurable mystery, and the experience of beauty serendipitous rather than predictable.
(/pretentious liberal arts student off)
They are truly gorgeous. I wish they were available in larger form to decorate my desktop. I could scale them up but even with a decent algorithm they would lose much of their impact in blurry giantness.
these are very interesting. love the blog.