In her sweeping, richly illustrated work on the uses of aerial views in wartime aftermaths, Caren Kaplan is interested in inhabiting the spaces-between. Creating and viewing aerial observations-by balloon, drone, or even optical-illusion painting-is a messy, uneven process that obfuscates the separations between science and art even as it creates them. Neither entirely instrumental "objective realism" nor aesthetic sensibility, views from the air reveal how the overlapping aftermaths of war infiltrate everyday life until "it becomes difficult to discover a place or time or way of life in which war is not palpable or present" (p. 132). Kaplan argues that the construction of aerial imagery as a singular, modern, "God's-eye-view" was achieved in fits and starts, and that the "God's-eye-view" itself is not a monolith. It obscures as much as it reveals, especially as aftermaths-a term she uses to describe the non-linear flow of time, place, and space that pushes wartime's "when" and "where" boundaries-continue to scar both the landscapes viewed and the people viewing. The longue-duree view of modern aerial views, Kaplan argues, reveals that all views from above are situated in a wartime aftermath.
展开▼
