Designs on the Land: Exploring America From the Air
By Alex S. MacLean
Thames & Hudson, 368 pages, $39.95 paper
Although it’s a commonplace to say that someone needs to see the big picture, much truly is gained from a fresh perspective, and no vantage point reveals more about our place in the grand scheme of things than the aerial view.
Our forebears dreamt of experiencing a bird’s-eye view of Earth, a longing that inspired many a myth and cautionary tale, as well as countless attempts to build flying machines, efforts ridiculous and sublime. Humans finally became airborne when the technological innovations of the 19th Century led to the advent of the hot-air balloon.
Given our species’ love of images and penchant for documentation, those who went aloft sought to capture the astonishing view from on high, and because the evolution of the camera paralleled that of aviation, aerial photography was quickly launched and practiced most famously in its early phase by Frenchman Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, best known by his pseudonym, Nadar.
But it took the creation of the airplane on our shores a century ago as of this December to fully reveal the mind-expanding splendor of the aerial perspective. None other than Wilbur Wright was at the controls in 1908 when L.P. Bonvillain took the first photograph from a plane over France. Bonvillain began a tradition that encompasses everything from military surveillance to great cinematic moments to the profound and breathtaking art form practiced by such intrepid, perceptive and aesthetically keen photographers as Emmet Gowin, Terry Evans, David Maisel and Alex MacLean.
Interest in aerial photography has grown over the past decade in sync with the rise in environmental consciousness. As we have become more aware of the immensity of the human footprint on the Earth, and of the complicated problems associated with overdevelopment, pollution, forest clear-cutting, strip mining and toxic waste, we’ve turned to aerial photographers like MacLean for a visual record of what we’ve wrought. For 30 years MacLean has been flying solo in small planes, camera in hand, surveying the spectacular interplay between the curving and meandering natural world and the hard-edged geometry of America’s massive infrastructure.
Trained as an architect, MacLean is keenly attuned to our use of space, whether he’s looking out over the immense, startlingly beautiful agricultural grid that orders so much of our nation’s open land thanks to the vision of Thomas Jefferson and the Land Ordinance Act of 1785, or the dense spread of Los Angeles, which, in one of the many thrilling micro-macro optical illusions that aerial photography creates, looks like the motherboard for a gargantuan computer. An inspired decipherer of the complexity of the American landscape–branded, harnessed and hard-working terrain–MacLean is particularly fascinated by the borders between the wild–oceans, rivers, mountains, forests and desert–and the constructed, be it pivot-irrigated fields, interstate interchanges, shopping malls, or housing developments.
This makes for highly dramatic images rich in contrast and emblematic of the tension between nature and civilization. In his clarifying introduction to this handsomely produced collection of more than 400 stunning color photographs, distinguished landscape architect James Corner describes the vistas MacLean focuses on as paradoxical: “at once coherently chaotic, singularly diverse and brutally elegant.”
A connoisseur of light, MacLean finds the ideal balance of radiance and shadow, and the perfect axis between color saturation and clarity. And he is a master framer: He never crops his photos in the darkroom. Through his eyes, landscapes monotonous to drive through, such as, let’s be frank, most of Illinois, are transformed into figured brocades of luminous gold and green. Serpentine wheat fields in Washington state turn into exquisite arabesques. Acres of wind turbines arc and twirl like 10,000 dancers, and tightly packed housing developments are positively cellular.
MacLean’s aerial images take three forms. Some are shot vertically, looking straight down; others are oblique, taken at an angle but without including the horizon; and a number trace the curve of the Earth–and each perspective is exhilarating and revealing. All are shot from altitudes lower than commercial flights, close enough to register the lush texture of a hayfield, architectural detail, stained asphalt and the lacy shadow of a single tree.
In a lively and generous interview (the commentary in this gorgeous and provocative volume is invaluable), MacLean explains that he learned to fly while still in graduate school because it seemed like a fun thing to do. It turned out, however, that flying filled him with fear and trepidation, but so amazed was he by revelations of altitude he kept at it, discovering that he was oddly suited to aerial photography not only because he is right-handed and left-eyed–allowing him to keep one eye on the controls and the other on the camera–but also because the neurological problems that cause him to suffer from dyslexia also allow him to easily take in a broad field and quickly process a panoramic view.
The categories MacLean uses to organize his images provide a key to his feelings about the way we live. Take abandonment for instance, a heading used for strongly patterned, hence irresistible, photographs of places where we deposit waste–such as landfills, junkyards and an Arizona “boneyard” for B-52 bombers–as well as haunting pictures of structures no longer in use, including an abandoned fish-processing plant, a railroad train barn and even a shopping mall. These images exemplify the brutal elegance Corner referred to, as do the brilliantly hued and moody pictures of fluorescent waterways and huge, billowing smoke plumes found in the chapter on pollution.
Parking lots are another unsettling subject of MacLean’s, calling to mind Joni Mitchell’s equally evocative song “Big Yellow Taxi” and the line, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” While these vast asphalt canvases with their carefully ruled lines and densely packed rows of bright and shiny cars create entrancing abstract images, MacLean’s musings over the environmental impact of so much paved land–acres and acres devoted to automobiles that actually stand empty most of the time–are sobering indeed. As are MacLean’s reflections on sprawl, the consumption of “outlying farmland and countryside around cities, towns, and villages,” which include some of his more subtly unnerving photos, those documenting speculative housing grids etched into the desert and other open lands, forecasts of an even-more-heavily-populated future.
In contrast to the hundreds of dazzling pictures detailing intense environmental exploitation, MacLean presents a suite of photographs of American Indian lands. Shot primarily in the Southwest, with, as MacLean avers, a “sense of sacredness,” these serene pictures depict ancient and contemporary settlements built in such harmony with their surroundings that they are all but camouflaged. It’s important to know that there are less destructive modes of existence than pell-mell development and rampant consumption.
“The landscape is an archive, a great human document, and we must learn how to read it,” writes landscape historian Jean-Marc Besse in the book’s closing essay, and MacLean’s resplendent, surprising, enthralling and provocative aerial photographs do just that. They allow us to see our world in a new light, awakening a profound sense of wonder and awe over the majesty of the Earth and arousing a wide range of conflicted emotions about our way of life.
One can’t help but marvel at our species’ boundless ingenuity and industriousness and the inadvertent beauty of our purposeful creations. But as viewers absorb the potent magic of these glorious aerial images, they will also tune into their subliminal message: For all our ingenuity and industriousness, we are vulnerable and short-lived creatures utterly beholden to an ancient and miraculous living planet.
