Kansas City Design Center - KCDC in the News -> Top-down view: Alex MacLean creates an aerial portrait of KC .

From ground level we tend to take Earth for granted. We walk or ride through our town, generally comfortable with what humans have built. We go about our days disconnected from the planet. Oh, maybe we take pleasure in our trees and our gardens, but Earth - we just can't see it.

From the air it's a different story.

And Alex S. MacLean has been chronicling that story for nearly 30 years. As an aerial photographer, MacLean can look closely at Earth from far above. That seeming contradiction - seeing better from a distance - becomes clear when you look at his photographs. They allow viewers to read the landscape as a combination of natural and human forces. They help us see that how we live makes an impact on the land.

Urban development, suburban sprawl, industrial production, agriculture - these things are all connected. They define how we live today in Kansas City or anywhere. From 500 or 5,000 feet on high, what those things say about our culture can emerge in sometimes startling ways.

Last year, MacLean spent more than 30 hours in the air looking closely at Kansas City from his plane.

Commissioned by the Kansas City Design Center, MacLean set out to compile an aerial portrait, if you will, of the area, to give us a new perspective on what building a city and suburbs on this patch of the planet might mean. The Design Center, a kind of educational think tank about architectural and city-planning issues, wanted to spread awareness about development problems and possibilities in the metro area.

"We asked him to find the features that are distinctive and expressive of what this area is about," says Daniel Serda, executive director of the Design Center.

MacLean took nearly 3,000 photos from the cockpit of his Cessna 182. A few dozen, including the pictures on these pages, will be on display beginning later this week at the Commerce Trust Gallery (see box on Page 10 for details).

His photographs often work as evocative pieces of art. Landscapes can appear as rhythmic patches of color that will remind viewers of abstract paintings by the likes of Richard Diebenkorn or Gerhard Richter.

But MacLean was trained as a landscape architect, and frequently what comes to the forefront in his images is the social and environmental story they reveal.

The exhibit will reflect both of those currents. Often, MacLean says, it's the aesthetic response that first captures viewers and causes them to pause and think about what they're seeing.

MacLean, based in Cambridge, Mass., recently interrupted a vacation in Canada to talk by phone about his work.

In your time in the air, what did you learn about the Kansas City area?

The perspective I came from was the idea of sustaining a sense of region. So I was looking at the regional characteristics. From a historical, geological and cultural point of view, what were the unique elements?

And then, I looked at cultural forces today that are homogenizing the landscape to make it look similar to other metropolitan areas.

Physically, looking at it, I was really surprised at how rolling it was, how much topography there was.

Among the interesting things were how the river systems - the Kansas and Missouri and the Blue - shaped the settlement patterns and the differences between the flood plain and when you got off the flood plain.

The flood plains were quite expansive. From a flying point of view, you can move along the watercourse quite easily. But most people, judging by the road patterns, experience the river by just crossing it at its narrowest points. In the minds of people, it probably appears smaller than it is.

Another interesting thing about Kansas City is the split between downtown Kansas City and the Plaza area. You have two distinct urban areas that are quite different. There are a lot less people living in the proximity of downtown as opposed to really a very high density of apartment buildings around the Plaza area. Which, I think, is one of the reasons they feel so completely different.

Were you surprised by the tree cover that shows up in your photographs around the Plaza and even in the suburbs?

That's something that's actually quite common in older suburban areas. You see that in Houston - an urban forest of sorts, the tree canopy, where the trees are all touching. It's pretty expansive.

But it does feel different from the surrounding area, which is basically prairie or open.

And I think it's something, at least from the aerial view, that gives you a new awareness of how extensive it is. So it is and it isn't surprising.

Can you talk about those two impulses going on in your work - the aesthetic and the informational?

That's sort of key, the aesthetic issue. I think it's important to have striking images that are graphic to bring a viewer in to look at the picture. In a lot of cases you're taken first by the aesthetic, and you come back for a second look or you actually start to think about what you're looking at in a way that you start to raise issues, start to raise questions about cultural values or history or what's going on in the picture. I really like to bring both of those things together.

A good example of that is the picture of the storage units (Page 9). There's a geometric, Mondrian quality to it.

The storage units are interesting. You see them all over the country now. It's a big industry. For a couple of reasons. One is they're ways of holding land inexpensively until the value shifts. For some big companies that's their strategy. It's a way of holding land and still making a profit.

But the other thing is there is obviously a definite need for them. I think it speaks to two things. One is general consumerism, where people buy more things than they can contain. The other part of it is society is very mobile and people who are in transition have to store things. Culturally it's a very telling phenomenon. It's a pattern you're starting to see in Europe, too.

Is there a particular time of day you like to shoot?

I like using a wide range of time, because you get a different feeling as the day goes on. I tend to shoot different things during the day depending on how the light looks. The more romanticized pictures tend to be taken at the end of the day. The morning light's beautiful, too, but it tends to be much more hazy, because often there's moisture rising from overnight. Then in the middle of the day, the light tends to be a little harsher, so if you're shooting things that might be called hardscapes, like paving, it makes it look that much harder. If you're editorializing and trying to make a point that way, that tends to work.

Describe how you shoot your pictures. Is it one hand on the wheel and one on the camera?

I sit in the left seat of the airplane and open the window. Cessnas are high wing planes, so the wings don't obscure the view, but they do have a strut. I can either shoot in front of the strut, between that and the propeller, or from the strut back to the horizontal elevator.

You get yourself set up and you can take both hands off the control yoke. My feet are on the rudder pedals, so I can steer with my feet.

What about your photo equipment?

Right now I'm using Canon EOS cameras. I use lenses between 300 mm and 24 mm. I use a gyro stabilizer on the bottom of the camera.

And mostly I use Fuji's Velvia film, which is a fairly slow speed and high contrast film. One of the problems with aerial photos is you have so much atmosphere between you and what you're looking at that it kind of desaturates the pictures. The higher contrast film compensates for that.

What kind of response do you want people to have to your photos?

Again going back to this theme of sustaining a sense of region, it's that people really start to appreciate the elements that make Kansas City unique. And that can include environmental awareness of better ways of managing resources and property as well as being culturally and historically more aware of earlier settlement patterns and historical building types that are unique to the Kansas City region.

One of the things I thought was great about the metropolitan area was all the small towns around it, either out on the flood plain or along the river. Towns like Lexington, even Lee's Summit. Towns like that that are starting to be surrounded by suburbia, and the older downtowns' economics are changing. But they're beautiful little towns that really should be thought of as places that should be more utilized.

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