This Land Is Your Land: Across America by Air

This Land Is Your Land offers a unique perspective on the American landscape, making the familiar fantastic, as well as an aesthetic experience of dizzying proportions. Marilyn Bridges takes us on an inspiring journey, as we look down together on the fleeting moments and lasting signatures of the United States that are etched on our continent. An aerial photographer who has explored ancient cultures around the world for more than a decade, Bridges has now focused her attention on a subject no less intriguing: the grandeur of America.

By flying and photographing at low altitudes, and by maintaining a sensuous closeness with her subject, Bridges avoids the simplistic representation of landscape as mere design. Divided regionally, This Land Is Your Land accents the variety of America, but follows civilization's uneasy interaction with the environment as a common thread. We see the earth shaped and reshaped to service humanity. Monuments rise to celebrate our achievements even as nature wards off intrusion. Fledgling communities spring up among lava and sand. Scars left by clear-cutting, mining, and nuclear waste raise concerns for the future. Yet here, too, there is ironic wit. The towering presidential portraits at Mount Rushmore appear dwarfed by surrounding mountains. The Statue of Liberty hides in plain sight, completely swathed in scaffolding. From the intimacy of a farmhouse to the majesty of the Grand Canyon, Bridges's original vision provides an unequaled perspective on the land in which we live.

In the Book's Essay by acclaimed writer William Least Heat-Moon, and the Afterword by Bridges, we are given insight into the photographer's working process and the inspiration behind her images. Certainly, This Land Is Your Land contains an urgent environmental message; in every photograph we sense a longing for a purer time, before humanity dismissed the land's indigenous curves and flow in favor of the urban grid. Still, Bridges offers no facile solutions or sentimental appeals. Faced with the jumble of American progress, we look for a vision of nature as idyllic--only to be awed by the savage forces unleashed by Mount St. Helens and the Kilauea volcano. Never what you expect, This Land Is Your Land provides page after page of visual surprises. The book inspires in us a haunting and profound admiration for a vibrant land which will prevail long after our civilization has gone.