Die Gestalt des Raumes

Landscapes – especially from a bird’s eye view – are fascinating. The aerial photographs taken by the photocopter from a height of up to 100 meters provide a new view of Germany’s landscapes, as a result of the social forces and processes that shape them. They provide an unobstructed view – close enough to reveal subtleties and structures, and remote enough to reveal large-scale interrelationships. Aerial photography is a method of spatial observation for recording landscape structures. Aerial photographs reveal structures and patterns of the landscape. By means of documentary photography, focal points of change in the Anthropocene era thus become discernible.

The photographs show the shape of space as a result of past and ongoing transformations. In this book, they are accompanied by analytical spatial science texts from different professional perspectives – with few maps and diagrams. This is intended to stimulate and support the discourse on the past and future of society’s handling of our spatial foundations of life, both pictorially and analytically.