David Maisel’s Proving Ground describes a place few citizens will ever see. Dugway Proving Ground spreads across nearly 800,000 acres of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert; its central work has been the development, testing, and implementation of chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. After more than a decade of inquiry, Maisel received Pentagon permission to photograph the site, its terrain, testing facilities, and the zones of toxic weapons deployment. Co-published by Radius Books and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, the book presents this work across 250 pages and 145 images, with texts by William L. Fox, Tyler Green, Katie Lee-Koven, and Geoff Manaugh.
Maisel begins on the ground, focusing on structures built to test the dispersal patterns of chemical warfare agents. He then shifts to an aerial perspective, and the site changes character: from above, test grids and the traces of simulated strikes resemble large-scale minimalist drawings inscribed on the land. The book holds both registers—a record of a working weapons complex and an exercise in abstraction in which human purpose becomes nearly illegible as terrain. The publisher page quotes Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography, describing the experience as one of immersion and disorientation, a series of otherworldly landscapes.
What distinguishes the project is the access behind it. Photographing Dugway meant negotiating entry into a restricted installation, and the photographs carry that negotiation into the frame. Maisel describes the site as hidden and walled off, yet a place that offers the chance to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society. The WSLAT facility—built to identify and neutralize chemical and biological toxins that could be weaponized by terrorists or rogue nations—appears alongside older test structures, so the images register not only a landscape but an ongoing program.
For collectors, Proving Ground extends Maisel’s long inquiry into the physical transformation of the American West, where natural systems and human intervention meet. Its subject is politically charged, its forms severe, and its production considered: a large-format book of substantial length in which essays treat the site as an artifact rather than an oddity. It belongs to the literature on landscape photography and military space, and to the shelf of anyone following Maisel’s work.
