Monochrome Landscapes - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 97

MONOCHROME LANDSCAPES
New York, 2004— I wanted a series of monochrome landscapes, and so I asked for
pictures of places on Earth primarily characterized by one of four basic colors:
white, blue, green, and yellow. The rules were simple, and generically, there were
not many choices: snow, water, trees, and sand. The satellites had been looking
at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and the Southern Desert in Iraq,
and they had to go over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and the Cameroonian
rain forest. For each of these places, I purchased the image data corresponding to
an eight-by-eight-kilometer square (about five by five miles) of the Earth's sur -
face. Two were already in the DigitalGlobe archives (Alaska and Iraq), and two
required new tasking (QuickBird at 0.61-meter resolution over the Atlantic, Ikonos
at 1-meter resolution over Cameroon). The results evoke questions that are at once
aesthetic and geopolitical, mapping some of the most vulnerable landscapes of our
time—the sparsely populated, resource-rich other sides of globalization.
ZOOM
Over a 16.5-by-16.5-kilometer surface—the footprint of a full QuickBird image—
a progressive zoom is already implied, right down to the two-thirds of a square
meter that constitutes the pixel itself. But the monochromatic character of the
images, in which every pixel looks pretty much alike, makes looking for something
in particular rather complicated. However, it's hard not to look for something—
even if it's just the pixels themselves.