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 |  | Editor: Alex MacLean
Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich
ISBN 978-3-8296-0383-6
For centuries, human beings have been shaping the world according to their will. The possibilities are seemingly limitless. Whole cities like giant oases with manicured golf courses and suburbs adorned with palm trees are built in the desert, kept artificially alive with water despite its scarcity. Huge holiday fortresses offering a little paradise for luxury-craving travellers rise from coasts threatened by erosion and hurricanes. Artificial housing developments are conjured up out of thin air. Characterised by cul-de-sacs and uniform house-plus-garden monocultures, they create anonymity and make cars essential to life and survival. Huge coal-fired and nuclear power stations produce vast amounts of electricity used almost as quickly as it is produced. Land speculators carve whole road networks into the landscape that stand out like warning scars on the earth.
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By recording these scenarios with the camera, the photographer and pilot Alex MacLean holds a mirror to humanity. For his book Over, he criss-crossed the USA in a plane, photographing suburbs, industrial facilities, power plants and sewage treatment plants, as well as gigantic wind farms and solar parks. Precisely because they are taken from a distance and at an unusual angle, these pictures open our eyes anew to our lifestyle – to its hope and hubris, its comfort and greed, its intoxicating possibilities and the impermanence of our existence. They also bring us into close contact with climate change, excessive forest clearance and urban sprawl, and many other things we consider lamentable but strangely distant from our everyday life. MacLean’s photographs document not only America’s ambition and excesses, but also that of other continents. After all, the American model has been enthusiastically adopted in Asia.
However, it is not only MacLean’s photographs, but also his detailed commentaries and short essays on themes such as dependence on the car, threatened deserts and the wastage of water that provoke thought. In the words of the science journalist Bill McKibben, they make the book an ˝exceptionally valuable document, because they name precisely those forces that are about to destroy our planet.” One should therefore be careful in reading Over simply as a documentation
of the American Way of Life. In his book, Alex MacLean shows us his home nation, apparently innocently – but on a deeper level he means all of us worldwide.
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