This Land Is Your Land

This Land Is Your Land offers a unique perspective on the American landscape, making the familiar fantastic, as well as an aesthetic experience of dizzying proportions. Marilyn Bridges takes us on an inspiring journey, as we look down together on the fleeting moments and lasting signatures of the United States that are etched on our continent. An aerial photographer who has explored ancient cultures around the world for more than a decade, Bridges has now focused her attention on a subject no less intriguing: the grandeur of America.

By flying and photographing at low altitudes, and by maintaining a sensuous closeness with her subject, Bridges avoids the simplistic representation of landscape as mere design. Divided regionally, This Land Is Your Land accents the variety of America, but follows civilization's uneasy interaction with the environment as a common thread. We see the earth shaped and reshaped to service humanity. Monuments rise to celebrate our achievements even as nature wards off intrusion. Fledgling communities spring up among lava and sand. Scars left by clear-cutting, mining, and nuclear waste raise concerns for the future. Yet here, too, there is ironic wit. The towering presidential portraits at Mount Rushmore appear dwarfed by surrounding mountains. The Statue of Liberty hides in plain sight, completely swathed in scaffolding. From the intimacy of a farmhouse to the majesty of the Grand Canyon, Bridges's original vision provides an unequaled perspective on the land in which we live.

In the Book's Essay by acclaimed writer William Least Heat-Moon, and the Afterword by Bridges, we are given insight into the photographer's working process and the inspiration behind her images. Certainly, This Land Is Your Land contains an urgent environmental message; in every photograph we sense a longing for a purer time, before humanity dismissed the land's indigenous curves and flow in favor of the urban grid. Still, Bridges offers no facile solutions or sentimental appeals. Faced with the jumble of American progress, we look for a vision of nature as idyllic--only to be awed by the savage forces unleashed by Mount St. Helens and the Kilauea volcano. Never what you expect, This Land Is Your Land provides page after page of visual surprises. The book inspires in us a haunting and profound admiration for a vibrant land which will prevail long after our civilization has gone.

Marilyn Bridges, one of the world's foremost aerial photographers, is the photographer/author of a number of books, among them Planet Peru and Markings (both published by Aperture), and Egypt: Antiquities from Above. She received her M.F.A. in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1981. Her images have been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia and are included in more than fifty collections worldwide. Bridges has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York State CAPS Grant, as well as Fullbright and NEA grants. She is a fellow of The Explorers Club and a licensed pilot for both single and multi-engine aircraft. She lives outside New York City and in Somerset, England. She is married to photojournalist Don McCullin.

William Least Heat-Moon, born of English-Irish-Osage ancestry in Kansas City, Missouri, is the author of the international bestseller Blue Highways (1982), named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Time magazine. His second book, PrairyErth (1991), an epic evocation of the American tall grass prairie country, was on the New York Times bestseller list for three months. He holds a doctorate in English, and a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. He is presently working on his next book, a narrative of a voyage through the waterways of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.