NEW YORK.-Overhead/Underfoot: The Topographical Perspective in Photography, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, features approximately 30 works from the Whitney’s permanent collection that trace the evolution of more than half a century of aerial photography in American art. Among the artists included are Margaret Bourke-White, Emmet Gowin, Michael Heizer, Ed Ruscha and James Turrell. The exhibition, curated by Dana Miller, Associate Curator, remains on view through September 25, 2005.

In 1858 the first aerial photograph was taken from a hot air balloon in the French countryside. This technology developed gradually over the next eight years until the Second World War, when it advanced rapidly as airborne reconnaissance became an important advantage in battle. In 1959, just over a hundred years after the first successful aerial photograph, an unmanned spacecraft captured the first images of earth from space. An important group of cutting-edge American artists soon began to approach art-mak ing from the modern, airborne perspective, rendering the familiar subject of landscape abstract and curious when rotated ninety degrees and seen macroscopically.

The above-ground viewpoint played an essential role in the conception and documentation of Earthworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), since many of these massive sculptural interventions with the earth could only be viewed fully from midair. This axial shift was sometimes prompted by the artists’ prior experience with architectural renderings or maps, both of which inherently incorporate the overhead angle. More recently, artists have used the aerial perspective to address the more ominous aspects of our modern world, including massive environmental degradation and the inescapable eye of satellite surveillance.

The show will also include works by Christo, Joe Deal, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Jon Kessler, Ray K. Metzker, Dennis Oppenheim, Gabriel Orozco, Michal Rovner, and Brett Weston.