David Maisel: Mount St. Helens—Afterlife

photographer’s monograph
David Maisel / Ivory Press
designed with David Maisel

From Marcia Bjornerud’s essay:
David Maisel’s previously unpublished photographs of the shattered landscape around Mount St. Helens three years after its eruption in May 1980 are visceral reminders of how shocking it was for a seemingly permanent topographic feature to change its form before our eyes. While Maisel’s images of the devastated mountain remain raw and unsettling, seeing them now, at the remove of decades, reveals new layers of meaning acquired with the passage of time....
Maisel’s images of the ash-shrouded area on the north slopes of the mountain convey an eerie emptiness. It is a monochrome, Strangelove landscape; black and white film was the obvious choice for a world whose palette was entirely grey. In his photographs, steam still rises from streams that had begun to slice gullies through the rubble and dust. Unstable heaps of rock and ash collapse under their own weight like gutted buildings. This, we think, must be what the apocalypse looks like.

144 pages
4.25 x 6 inches