Denis Cosgrove

Photography and Flight charts the rich and varied history of aerial photography, which has been used for everything from geographic exploration to secret spy missions. Beginning with early images taken from hot-air balloons and fixed platforms, Denis Cosgrove and William Fox then explain how military reconnaissance was instrumental in catalysing innovations in the field. They examine pivotal historical moments when aerial photography began to establish itself as an essential tool, such as in Second World War military strategies, high-altitude photography taken from postwar rockets and aircraft, and the extensive implementation of aerial photography during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book also explores the advancement of geographic scholarship through aerial photography, ranging from military excursions into remote areas like Antarctica to the images of the curvature of the earth taken during the Apollo space missions. While digital technology and remote sensing have changed the landscape of photography, Photography and Flight argues that they have not diminished the significance of aerial photography in providing images of the earth. Rather, new technologies and resulting innovations such as Google Earth have enabled the mass-democratization of access to such information.

"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or a solid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images of it."-from the Preface Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space-to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo-images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In Apollo's Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.

"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or a solid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images of it."-from the Preface Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space-to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo-images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In Apollo's Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.