Terminal Mirage examines the periphery of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, including zones of mineral evaporation ponds and macabre industrial pollution covering some 40,000 acres along the shores of the lake.

“The concentration of minerals in the little water remaining in Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red.In Terminal Mirage, my aerial images of the Great Salt Lake in Utah become a means to explore the disturbingly engaging duality between beauty and repulsion, as the curator Anne Tucker has written about this series. The Great Salt Lake is, indeed a ‘terminal’ lake – it has no natural outlets – and this physical property results in the lake’s exceptional richness in sodium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, sulphate, and other elements. Commercially operated evaporation ponds ring the lake’s perimeter, in order to extract these minerals from the lake for industrial use. The nearby Tooele Army Depot (depicted in my penultimate photograph submitted from this series) is, however, the site of many of the nation’s aging chemical weapons, housed in thousands of storage ‘igloos’. These weapons are periodically incinerated on site, sending contaminated ash over the waters of the Great Salt Lake, which is then – disturbingly, inexplicably – mined for its mineral content.”
- Daniel Maisel

2005 Exhibition catalogue