The Mining Project

David Maisel’s The Mining Project reveals the beauty and grandeur of some of the most visibly polluted places on Earth:

Rather than a condemnation of a specific industry, however, my images are intended as an aesthetic response to such despoiled landscapes. These sites are the contemplative gardens of our time, places that offer the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society. The photographer Walker Evans spoke of the “enchantment of the aesthetically rejected subject.” Similarly, I recognize that strip mines, tailings ponds, cyanide leaching fields, and other such zones form a toxic, yet strangely compelling, terra incognita. I am interested in the cartographic powers of photography, and in making an art of the actual, that renders the uncompromising realities of a flawed, complex world.

[Via kottke.org]