History's Shadow, published by Nazraeli Press, is a conceptual photography project and monograph that explores the intersection of art preservation, scientific imaging, and the passage of time.
Maisel culled thousands of conservation X-rays from museum archives (such as the Getty Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco) depicting ancient sculptures, artifacts, and artworks. Placing these structural X-ray sheets on light boxes in a darkened studio, he re-photographed them using long exposures on film, transforming raw scientific documentation into ghostly, spectral art prints.
Because X-rays map both the exterior contours and interior structures (revealing internal armatures, pins, cracks, and structural decay), the project flattens three-dimensional historical objects into two-dimensional maps of inner and outer space.
The book treats the physical artifacts as records of human history, using light and radiography to make invisible internal traumas and construction methods visible. By stripping away the surface patina and museum display contexts, the ancient objects are reanimated into mysterious, modern visual forms that collapse the distance between antiquity and contemporary photography.
The Lake Project (2003) is a seminal photographic study documenting the environmental devastation of Owens Lake in California.
Located in Eastern California, Owens Lake was completely drained starting in 1913 to fill the Los Angeles Aqueduct, turning a 110-square-mile body of water into a dry lakebed.
The desiccated lake bed became the single largest source of carcinogenic particulate dust pollution in North America. Mitigation efforts later flooded parts of the lakebed with water and chemical treatments, creating unusual mineral deposits, toxic concentration pools, and concentrated bacterial blooms.
Maisel captured the lakebed from low-altitude aircraft, looking straight down onto the terrain to eliminate the horizon line. The resulting imagery flattens the landscape into brilliant, surreal abstractions, resembling abstract expressionist paintings, blood-red veins, cellular biology, or cosmic maps rather than recognizable topography.
The Toxic Sublime of Invisible Disasters â€The project engages with the concept of the "sublime", creating stunning visual beauty out of severe environmental damage and human disruption. â€By bringing an aerial lens to a hidden ecological disaster, the work exposes the far-reaching physical footprint of urban water diversion and resource extraction.
