From God's-eye to Camera-eye: Aerial Photography's Post-humanist and Neo-humanist Visions of the World

Abstract

Aerial photographs are most commonly associated with notions of panoptic vision or the environmental sublime. This paper reviews the dystopian and utopian discourses surrounding aerial photography and suggests a third approach to understanding aerial vision as dialectically situated between the poles of science and art, rationality and imagination, abstracted and embodied knowledge, visibility and invisibility, the archive and the museum.