While militarized landscapes may not have shifted in their general character – the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear devices have been tested since 1950, now hold monthly tours for morbid adventurers – there is a clear and present sense that global warming applies geopolitically as well as ecologically. Photographer David Maisel’s current and eerily timely body of work, titled Proving Ground, depicts, from the air, parts of an 800,000-acre chemical weapons testing facility in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert.

I’ve felt that these sites reflect us, reflect back the psyche of the society that made them David Maisel

The Dugway Proving Ground is a classified military site, established during the second world war, which conspiracy theorists have dubbed the ‘New Area 51’ because of secrecy surrounding the site. Its primary mission was to provide development and production testing of chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. From the sky, it appears like a massive series of geometric drawings etched into flatlands. Concentric circle targets have been mapped out to measure the distances that clouds of deadly gases will travel, and the toxicity levels of said weaponry, information that can be utilized in defensive or offensive strategies. The black and white pictures, printed on aluminum and arranged in grids, have an eerie calm, but the material strikes a more urgent, ominous tone in light of the recent horrific chemical attack in Northern Syria: Dugway has been exposed to those same toxic gases.

Terminal Mirage 26, 2003 Photograph: David Maisel

Working in a studio space in idyllic Sausalito, not far from now historic military outposts on the bluffs of the west coast, Maisel is readying his new pieces for upcoming exhibitions and a book, published by Steidl, both to appear this fall. It’s not the first time Maisel has focused on landscapes that bear morally and ecologically thorny human interventions. He’s done work on a US ammunitions storage facility, a Spanish borax mine, and various environmental catastrophes. His work explores destruction, reveals powerful visual aesthetic in such locations.

“Throughout multiple projects in this vein, I’ve felt that these sites reflect us, reflect back the psyche of the society that made them, and that they reveal, perhaps, something at the core of who we are,” he says.

The narrative of their making is long and labyrinthine, and speaks to ways in which art can address the contemporary condition. In 2003, he did an aerial series of photographs on a munitions storage facility, housing nearly 30 million pounds of aging mustard gas and nerve agents, just 25 miles from Salt Lake City. “It’s stored in 900 small ‘igloos’ at the facility, awaiting disposal, spread across the desert floor in a grid. From the air, they resembled a Donald Judd installation or perhaps a prototype of some kind of suburban housing. But the notion of chemical weapons and nerve agents sitting in the landscape set off alarm bells for me. Why were they here? Where were they from?”

The answer was Dugway. Maisel began seeking access to this highly regulated facility. “A friend of mine who does contract work with the Pentagon volunteered to make some inquiries on my behalf. The initial response from the Pentagon in 2004, under the administration of George W Bush, was ‘not now.’ And, in a way, this was encouraging. ‘Not now’ didn’t mean ‘never.’ It left the door open,” he says.

After a decade of patience and negotiations with officials in the US Department of Defense, Maisel was granted permission to photograph from the air, and on the ground. “Naturally, every aspect was vetted in advance, and either approved or denied. My pilot and my assistant needed to be vetted as well. When I flew over the facility to photograph enormous grids etched into the desert floor where weapons testing occurred, I had a representative of Dugway in the Cessna with me, to insure that I didn’t vary from our permitted course. Every element of my time on site was highly controlled and choreographed.”

In May 2016 details of the experiments which took place at the 800,000-acre facility were first made public. Mostly it served as a testing site for conventional weaponry – cluster bombs etc – but alongside that work was more experimental work, such as one study titled Operation Bellwether that looked into weaponizing mosquitos.

Proving Ground South Ballistics Grid 04, 2014 Photograph: David Maisel

“I felt a kind of deep, implicit, if unspoken acknowledgment that this was an extremely charged environment, where there’s a kind of darkness and danger to the research that happens there. However, simultaneously, I found was that the people working at Dugway were both dedicated to their work and respectful of mine.”

Maisel’s attraction to the site poses potent questions. Why does a place like Dugway continue to exist today? Perhaps it is necessitated by the world we live in, and by the existence of virulent toxins like anthrax and sarin gas, which can be weaponized by governments and terrorists alike. In February of this year, Kim Jong-nam, the brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was killed with VX nerve agent.

“I’ve been looking at sites of traumatic disturbance, primarily in the American landscape, for more than 30 years. Much of this work focuses on themes of development and destruction of the environment, examining sites of natural resource extraction and its unintended consequences or side effects. But, throughout multiple projects in this vein, I’ve felt that these sites reflect us, reflect back the psyche of the society that made them, and that they reveal, perhaps, something at the core of who we are.”

The complexity of the site resulted in Maisel’s first work in video, an amalgamation of 50,000 frames of still aerial photographs of the test grids that flash rhythmically to communicate a sense of enormity, impending doom, and existential foreboding. Titled Kydoimos, which translates roughly as The Din of Battle, the video includes a moody score by experimental musician Chris Kallmyer. “The entire piece is thrumming, insistent, and ominous. But I think there is also an element of elegy and loss conveyed as well,” Maisel says.

The printed works, which are arranged in grids, and the video are ripe with a sense that that resolution is elusive and there is frightening power to the constant state of suspense. “There is certainly a kind of visceral attraction/repulsion going on with this environment,” he says. “The proving ground is a disturbing place. The need for such a place is itself disturbing. We are looking at a remote setting that exists in order to test the most potent, destructive biological and chemical nerve agents known. One can’t help but feel the heart of darkness at the core of its mission.”