Look Out
The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
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- €13.99
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
"A charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the 'aerial view' . . . McPherson makes an elliptical and enchanting case for reinserting wherever possible the ground-level, human perspective . . . 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."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
As if Borges and Didion took a tour with Sebald through the beauty and terror of our present and past, Look Out is a profound and prismatic investigation of taking the long view.
Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control—and the stakes are high for everyone.
The aerial view—a position known in Greek as the catascopos, or “the looker-down”—is a fundamentally privileged perspective, inaccessible to those left on the ground. To the earthbound, (in)sights from such rarified heights convey power and authority. McPherson casts light on our fetishization of distance as a path to truth and considers the awe and apocalypse of taking the long view.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 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 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 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.
