Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture

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Description

The view from above, or the 'bird's-eye' view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of 'everywhere' supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics from sixteenth-century Roman maps to the Luftwaffe's aerial survey of Warsaw to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.

Reviews

A collection of 16 extraordinarily rich essays by specialist authors, Seeing from Above explores the rhetorical complexity, cultural significance and various instrumentalities of aerial visuality as it has spread and ramified throughout visual culture at large. * Visual Studies *
The collection of writings is, as other reviewers have attested, an extraordinary exposure of seeing from above and the aerial imagination. * Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand *

Author Bio

Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis.