Hole in the Clouds

Bird's Eye Views

Sep 6, 2009

Satellite views and computer-generated maps have become commonplace. A bird's eye view of our world no longer seems exotic and magical, the way it did a century or so ago, when only an artist's imagination could sweep us beyond our earthbound horizons.

Before planes and satellites, ordinary people could only dream of seeing the world from on high. In America's younger years, traveling artists fed the dream, visiting frontier villages and bustling cities to sketch and map and reproject the ordinary, creating prints that puahed back the old horizons to open astonishing new visions--what we'd made of the land, what we were hoping to make of it.

The Hole in the Clouds bird's-eye-view project combines old and new for a fresh look at the world around us. Using both high-tech imagery and old-fashioned inspiration, we present views from above that try to capture the wide sweep of landscape and humanscape in our everyday surroundings.