Alternative Landscapes

I recently came across two interesting books containing views of convex surfaces that we usually think of as being flat.

The first is a series of nighttime photographs taken from space, which are published in a book called Lights of Mankind (photos by NASA, text by L. Douglas Keeney). For me, what makes the images work, apart from the visually complex lighted networks of roads and fractal-like splotches of cities, is the low camera angle that emphasizes the curvature of the earth. See more examples here.

The same grazing perspective occurs in some of Abelardo Morell's photographs from A Book of Books, for example here and here.

In both cases, the eye is drawn towards the horizon, as with a landscape shot. Conventional photographs of these subjects might focus solely on the images in the books or the patterns of lights on the earth. But here, the books and the earth themselves become part of the photographs. It's like the veil has been lifted and the objectness of these surfaces -- these carriers of information -- has been revealed.