Down from up

Two things separate Milstein's excellent book of photos from other looking down titles. One, he shoots vertically rather than the more usual bird's eye view and two, the very fine printing screen to reveal the amazing detail. The eighty-four photos are divided into four chapters: neighborhoods; commerce; parks and recreation; transportation and industry.

The straight shot look has the advantage of reducing the perspective so that the top of something becomes clearer in relation to nearby buildings. Mid-town Manhattan, with its grid streets seems far more interesting than an angled shot. The Carnival Vista cruise liner, docked in New York, looks amazing with decks full of dazzling color, the photo is opposite the rather staid looking Queen Mary in Long Beach. The big, wealthy homes on the curving North Doheny Drive in LA are a mixture of styles with their pools, tennis courts and trees everywhere and on those with flat roofs the air-con can clearly be seen. A few pages before this photo the straight streets in the LA city of Carson show middle class homes packed tightly together, very few trees and no pools. Some of photos are taken at dusk like Century City and Times Square aglow with street lights and neon or the container port in Long Beach looking straight down on a ship surrounded by a black sea.

Transportation and industry has an interesting selection of scrap yards, refineries, container ports though oddly no rail yards. Airports always look fascinating, five photos here show the usual shape of jets contrasting with different shaped buildings and ground markings.

I thought the vertical photos certainly gave this book an advantage over the usual birds eye view aerial images. A volume two?