Photographer Catalogs Our Urban Landscape Using Google Earth

125 Swimming Pools

Very much like those old timey entomologists who used to frame rare species of butterflies and hang them in their office for future study, American photographer Jenny Odell has created a series entitled Satellite Collections, which is a methodical, systematized and well-organized inventory of our living environment. Yet she didn't go hunting for large insects of the tropical rainforest but opted instead for less organic subjects—our everyday, man-made techno-structures.

Using aerial shots taken by satellites and the online cartographic tool Google Earth, Odell compiled some new “species” from our urban surroundings. She cut and gathered them in digital frames into meticulous biological charts of the kind used by scientists. She likes to call the series "hieroglyphs," as if they were symbols of our technological civilization that future generations will have to decipher. You know, after the Singularity or the next Ice Age hits.

The satellite view tricks our usual perception into re-conceiving these mundane objects and places in a poetic way, yet despite the aerial vantage point, the series still comes off as decidedly down to earth. Sports arenas, public parks, nuclear plants that look like smoking coffee mugs, and grain silos that look like candies are all human achievements that seem to champion our industriousness and architectural ability. By using Hannah Arendt's philosophical claim that “because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence”, Odell tries to isolate these objects to underline their solitary state and, one could even say, loneliness, whenever humans are put outside the frame.

The virtue of Odell's work lies in this "art of collecting," dear to the heart of all philatelists and herbarium enthusiasts of all kinds. Those frames could easily be compared to rough sketches or highly colored and graphic frescos, and they form a consistent project that should allow the artist to become a sort of historian of our urban environments

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