Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View

Guggenheim fellow McPherson (The History of the Future) presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the “aerial view.” From maps to satellite imagery, McPherson explores how the top-down vantage point offers the promise of seeing “the bigger picture,” even as it “erase[s] as much as it reveals.” He begins with the ultimate example of the aerial view, the famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth taken from space in 1972, which he juxtaposes with contemporaneous events on the ground—“bombs go[ing] off across Belfast... the Philippines under martial law,” and the Watergate arrests—all of which make the “sudden clarity that supposedly comes from seeing the Earth from above” begin to feel chimerical and if anything a mystification, or even a “threat.” McPherson then surveys the history of aerial viewing, from Alexander the Great’s mythical flying machine that he used to view his conquered lands through 19th-century America’s “mania” for “bird’s-eye view” maps to the “geospatial intelligence” of modern military surveillance systems—he ruminates on the “fuzzy black and white satellite” photos presented by Colin Powell to the UN as evidence of Iraqi WMDs—and the current ubiquity of drones. McPherson makes an elliptical and enchanting case for reinserting wherever possible the ground-level, human perspective, which will “unsettle[e] the bigger story with ambivalence and doubt.” Redolent with insights into the ethical quandary of history-making, as well as the author’s own sense of awe at the full sweep of the human story, this is a wonder. (Oct.)