The first photograph in David Maisel's new book presents a view into a storeroom that clearly doesn't get a lot of foot traffic. An old wooden desk with no chair is parked in the corner. Bits of debris have gathered on the stained linoleum floor. The walls are what give this room, and Maisel's book, its name: "Library of Dust."
Shelves packed with corroded copper cans stretch from floor to ceiling, like the backroom of a post-apocalyptic grocery store. The room is actually a warehouse of sorts. It's part of an abandoned ward at the Oregon State Hospital, and the canisters contain the unclaimed cremated remains of former psychiatric patients.
The final image in Maisel's book, released in October by Chronicle Books, shows the same archive two years later, given higher priority. The new shelves hold orderly rows of clean black boxes, each with a numbered metal tag.
In the pages between the 2005 and 2007 photographs, words and images trace the artist's fascination with secrets, transformation and loss, his confrontation with the sublime and his unexpected political advocacy.
Maisel, 47, lives in Mill Valley and maintains a studio in neighboring Sausalito. By phone recently, he confessed to a predilection for "things that aren't intended to be seen." For the past 20 years, that has meant aerial views of copper and coal mines, clear-cut forests, the ecological disaster that was once Owens Lake, the mutating expanse of Los Angeles and the shifting chemistry of the Great Salt Lake.
With their emphasis on structure, texture and tonality, his photographs (color and black-and-white) verge on abstraction, while mapping the impact of time and human action on the landscape.
When Maisel heard about the canisters of remains in the Salem, Ore., institution, he knew immediately that he wanted to photograph them. "I was very interested in the notion that they were previously hidden away. Even without seeing them, their story was so charged. These were individuals who had been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by their families, written out of their families' own histories."
Before Maisel was born, his grandfather had undergone electroshock therapy to treat severe depression, but the photographer didn't learn of it until he was an adult. "So I glimpsed the way these kind of histories disappear, not through any malicious intent but because we want to forget."
