Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia and the Middle East for over 20 years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man's footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth's surface. This volume, published in conjunction with a touring exhibition of Gowin's photographs, focuses on images created after 1986. That was the year Gowin began to extend his aerial photography explorations in America by recording images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic and more. The work also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic. In this volume, Jock Reynolds provides an overview of Gowin's aerial photography and places it in the context of his earlier work and that of such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams and Frederick Sommer. There is an essay by Philip Brookman who illuminates Gowin's work in the Czech Republic, while an essay from Terry Tempest Williams discusses Gowin's images from the American West, especially in his Nevada Test Site series.