Look Out

Look Out is an investigation of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down perspectivesfrom preCivil 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, architects, artists, and entrepreneurs, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to controland the stakes are high for everyone. The aerial viewa position known in Greek as the catascopos, or the looker-downis 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.