This Land Is Your Land: Across America by Air

Marilyn Bridges' fifth title finds her exploring a decidely less sacred landscape than her previous monographs Peru, Sacred Markings, and Egypt. These images portray the irony of America from above, with everything from the giant bronze "praying hands" of Oral Roberts University to the pleasure boat congested, artificial waterways of Arizona. The essay by William Least Heat-Moon--author of Blue Highways--helps reveal the meaning behind these images, bringing them into an ecological and spiritual perspective.

When do buffalo look like cockroaches? When does a nuclear site look like a work of art? No doubt about it, things look different from the air. Flying high above the ground in a plane and looking down is one thing; photographing it is quite another. But Marilyn Bridges has met the challenge with imagination and verve. Viewing her black and white photographs of World War II aircraft gunnery tracks in the California desert, Washington monuments, or Oklahoma wheat fields, one can "feel something about our interaction with the land" and experience "the pure emotional response" Bridges gets behind the camera.