Used for everything from geographic evaluation to secret spy missions, aerial photography has a rich and storied history, ably recounted here in "Photography and Flight."
Aerial photography is marked by its dependency on technological developments in both photography and aerospace, and the authors chart the history of this photography as it tracked the evolution of these technologies. Beginning with early images taken from hot-air balloons, fixed platforms, and subsequent handheld camera technology, Denis Cosgrove and William Fox then explain how military reconnaissance and governmental projects were instrumental in catalyzing these and other innovations in the field. They examine pivotal historical moments in which aerial photography began to establish itself as essential tool, such as in World War II military strategies, high-altitude photography taken from postwar rockets and aircraft, and the use of aerial photography during the cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book also explores the advancement of geographic scholarship through aerial photography, ranging from military excursions into Antarctica to the images of the curvature of the earth taken during the Apollo space missions.
While digital technology and remote sensing have changed the landscape of photography, "Photography and Flight" argues that they have not diminished the significance of aerial photography in providing images of the earth. Rather, new technologies and resulting innovations such as Google Earth have enabled the mass democratization of access to such information. "Photography and Flight" ultimately reveals how the camera lens from far away continues to unearth telling details about the land and those who live upon it.

William L. Fox is a longtime explorer of cognition and landscape -- the notion of what makes a space into a place. In this book he turns his gaze on Los Angeles, a city dominated by the movie industry, which specializes in bringing places from far away in time into what we experience as here and now -- making time, in essence. Time, Fox tells us, is the most invisible nature of all, "its effects are always and everywhere around us."
The five essays of this collection take us to the Le Brea Tar Pits and local oilfields, the telescopes and telecommunication towers of Mt. Wilson, massive landfills, the Forest Lawn Memorial and Griffith parks, a Hollywood special effects firm, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All of these facilities are devoted to manipulating time on our behalf, be it how we represent prehistory, attempt to maintain an identity after death, or make movies on Mars.
A master of combining science, history, and his own experiences into a riveting read, Fox will make you look at L.A. -- and any urban landscape -- in an entirely new way.

The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his work. Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art. Author William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for decades. Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape, his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing his magnum opus - the mile-long sculpture City - and his access to some of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to Heizer's work - including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely lost to the elements - to correct the often inconsistent accounts of their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would thoroughly inform his work. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in American art.

Foreword by Jeff Kelley. Nevada's open spaces have long inspired complex responses from a population largely shaped by European sensibilities toward land and its uses. In Mapping the Empty Fox considers how eight of the state's most distinguished and innovative contemporary artists have responded to the harsh, enigmatic landscapes of the Great Basin and how, through their work, they have expressed and helped to define our attitudes toward the space we call the West. The artists are Jim McCormick, Rita Deanin Abbey, Dennis Parks, Walter McNamara, Robert Beckmann, Michael Heizer, Bill Barker, and Mary Ann Bonjorni.

Late Harvest juxtaposes contemporary art made with taxidermy with historically significant wildlife paintin gs, resulting in intriguing parallels and startling aesthetic aesthetic contrasts. The publication seeks to simultaneously confirm — through historically - significant wildlife paintings — and subvert — through contemporary art and photography — viewers’ preconcepti ons of the place of animals in culture. The richly illustrated catalogue will feature artists as: Richard Ansdell, David Brooks, George Browne, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Petah Coyne, Raymond Ching, Kate Clark, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carle e Fernandez, Richard Friese, François Furet, Nicholas Galanin, George Bouverie Goddard, Damien Hirst, William Hollywood, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Alfred Kowalski, Robert Kuhn , Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, Polly Morgan, John Newsom, T im Noble and Sue Webster, Walter Robinson, George Rotig, Carl Rungius, Yinka Shonibare MBE, David Shrigley, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Amy Stein, Archibald Thorburn, Mary Tsiongas, Joseph Wolf, Brigitte Zieger, Andrew Zuckerman The exhibition Late Harvest is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in consultation with the National Museum of Wildlife Art. It is curated by JoAnne Northrup, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, together with consulting curator Adam Duncan Harris, Ph.D., Petersen Curator of Art & Research, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

What Barry Lopez did in expanding our vision of the frozen North in Arctic Dreams, William Fox has done in broadening our perceptions of the desert expanses of the West's Great Basin.

Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful influence on human desire and imagination.

The Void, the Grid, & the Sign guides us to a place so unusual and disorienting that it can overcome rationality and become the locus for our most fanciful and fearsome projections: mythical rivers, mammoth artistic earthworks, alien spaceships, jet-propelled race cars, and weapons of mass annihilation.

In "The Void", Fox walks us through this landscape, investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance -- a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and undifferentiated by shape and form and color, that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired.

"The Grid" focuses on the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fremont in his search for the legendary Buenaventura River. Fox invites us on a Great Basin road trip, tracing the "net" of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history.

"The Sign" considers the language and the metaphorswe continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where the neon-lined boulevards of Las Vegas overlay and interplay with millennia-old petroglyphs and pictographs.

Through vivid and arresting prose drawing from the disciplines of natural history, art history, cognitive psychology, western history, archaeology and anthropology, The Void, the Grid, & the Sign traverses the knowns and the unknowns of the Great Basin, offering a tour de force of inquiry and thought.