The permissive explorations of such photographic artists as David Maisel, Michael Light, and Laura Kurgen conclude this study. Following in the aerial footsteps of Ruscha, Maisel takes photo- graphs of the Los Angeles topography from 10,000 feet, reversing its opalescent light by printing his images in negative so that the pale sky becomes ominously black, buildings appear white e ‘hollowed out as if by bombs’ (p. 134) e and the freeways become winding arteries, lending an overall impression of apocalypse summarized in the title of Maisel’s series Oblivion. As Cosgrove and Fox point out, their ‘sunshine and noir’ iconography pays no homage to the convention of mapping. They refuse to offer conciliatory means of orientation. Instead they decouple us from the familiar and force us to approach the urban on new, if uncannily familiar, terms

Gough, Paul

English

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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attachedcopy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial researchand education use, including for instruction at the authors institutionand sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling orlicensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third partywebsites are prohibited.In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of thearticle (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website orinstitutional repository. Authors requiring further informationregarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies areencouraged to visit:http://www.elsevier.com/copyrightAuthor's personal copyand on the economic activities and social problems of Lyon at thattime. It is true thatmuch supplementary information is conveyed in55 pages of notes, but their volume strikes me as excessive whencompared with the 163 pages of the main body of the text.Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UKdoi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.001Craig A. Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquari-anism in the Age of Empiricism. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 2009, 344 pages, US$50 hardcover.The English Virtuoso is an ambitious attempt to rework ourunderstanding of the landscape of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English intellectual life. Craig Hanson argues that we haveoverly compartmentalised our understanding of English scholar-ship in this era, notably around a binary between ‘relevant’ workdriven by the Baconian dictates of the new science and ‘eccentric’inquiries conducted by antiquarians trading in the currency ofa debased form of humanism. Hanson starts by making the point(p. 21) that ‘science’ in this era retained a close kinship with thebroader concept of ‘scientia’ or all knowledge. This translated intothe Royal Society’s sponsoring and publishing material that was notrestricted to experimental natural philosophy but which extendedto travel accounts, early archaeology, and the principles of paintingand connoisseurship.Pursuing this insight, Hanson pays particular attention toa neglected but recurrent nexus betweenmedicine, antiquarianism,art and science. He points out that the largest single group ofmembers of the seventeenth-century Royal Society were physiciansby training and profession, who comprised some one in fivemembers of the Society (p. 69). Their interests, however, were notrestricted to matters modern scholars would deem medical. Ratherphysicians engaged with classical scholarship, seeking not tooverturn ancient medical authorities in the light of the new science,but to reconcile the two. Thus the Galenic belief in the influence ofcelestial motion on human health, for example, was reworkedunder the influence of Newtonian thought in the eighteenthcentury by the influential Dr Richard Mead. The reason for thisreconciliation was the broader need of physicians to prove theircredibility as practitioners of an art more elevated than merequackery by attaching it to knowledge structures such as reverencefor the ancients which functioned as cultural capital in the era. AsHanson shows, medical practitioners had to tread a fine linebetween embracing the ‘empiricism’ of the new science and beingcastigated as mere ‘empirics’, that is, those who practised medicinewithout a theoretical and scientific basis through observationalone. Another strategy physicians used to secure their credibilitywas to show a gentlemanly or virtuosic skill in other forms ofinquiry, notably in art theory, connoisseurship, and antiquarianism.Hanson shows that many of the most important treatises in theseareas were penned by physicians, and that inquiries in both art andantiquarianism saw a similar need to balance a belief in empiricismwith a theoretical overview to those experienced by medicalpractitioners, such that physicians working across these (to oureyes) diverse inquiries experienced similar tensions in theconstruction of their scholarly personae. Like physicians, anti-quarians struggled to be seen as elevated in their speculationsabout the past rather than, as satirical stereotypes suggested, merecrazed collectors of detritus from it. Criticism of scholarly creden-tials in one area, such as medicine, for a failure to tread the correctpath to empiricism without being an empiric could easily translateinto criticism of skills as an antiquarian and vice versa.For historians of geographical thought, The English Virtuosooffers some interesting points of departure. It allows them to buildon David Livingstone’s insights about the interconnections ofgeographywith religion, science, and astrology during the scientificrevolution and their alterity to our present day expectations, and tosee that similarly wide-ranging and unfamiliar interconnectionscan be found in a later age, the age of the virtuosi of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. For whilst it is not Hanson’s quarry,cultures of geographical learning crop up frequently in his book.Medical men such as William Aglionby composed travel narrativesas part of their construction of a scholarly persona (pp. 95e6).Furthermore, amongst the items with which physicians weredepicted in portraiture were globes, part of the more generalaccoutrements of learning through which they imagined theirpersonae (figure 8, p. 30). Likewise, Hanson’s analysis of WilliamSalmon’s influential treatise on painting, Polygraphice (1672),shows that the frontispiece includes an image of an artist drawinga geographical map (figure 35, p. 112), something which reminds usof the close filiations between geography, art, and the craft oflimning in this era. Further, Hanson’s discussion of Salmon’s careeras a hackwriter of medical and artistic treatises (pp. 108e21) bearsclose scrutiny by those who study English geographical writers inthe same era, many of the contours of their lives in publishingbearing close similarities. This also opens up the rather neglectedquestion of the intersections between cultures of geographical andmedical writing in this era. Hanson points out that many of themedical virtuosi he studies drew topographical prints and pennedchorographies and county histories. Clearly, there were intersec-tions in English print culture between geography andmedicine andthey would repay further study in the light of the vistas Hanson’swork opens up.For Hanson, we can recover the rationale of scholarly debates inseventeenth- and eighteenth-century England only once weacknowledge that the culture of the virtuosi depended on intel-lectual connections quite alien to present compartmentaliseddivisions of knowledge, and that this led to different circuits ofpraise and censure. In this culture geography tangentially keepsmaking its appearance both in text and image. Perhaps, to start tothink through English geographical writing in this era as part of theculture of the virtuosi that Hanson depicts so convincingly wouldbe to open new angles on the history of geography, ones which, likeHanson’s study, would dissolve our received ideas about whatcounted as geography and where one should look for cultures ofgeographical writing in early-modern England.Robert J. MayhewUniversity of Bristol, UKdoi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.005Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight. London,Reaktion Books, 2010, 144 pages, £13.56 paperback.When Keyhole, Inc., a small US software company specializing ingeospatial data visualization applications, was bought by Google in2004, few could have imagined the huge impact of its ‘EarthViewer3D’ geographic information programme. Re-released as ‘GoogleEarth’ in 2005, the web-based mapping site soared in popularity.Within twelve months it ranked among the ten ‘most searched for’websites in the United Kingdom, with searches increasing twenty-fold within months. Nearly a quarter of new viewers were ‘silverReviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 484e497494Author's personal copysurfers’ aged fifty-five or older who were drawn to the internet(perhaps for the first time) to scan distant continents, zoom in onpeaks and plateaux, or merely check which car was parked in thedrive when the photograph was taken. The blanketing of our planetwith remote sensors that now provide almost continuous real-timecoverage from all-seeing eyes has had a profound effect on ourunderstanding of the world. The ubiquity of such images, argueCosgrove and Fox, has not dented our fascinationwith aerial imagery,but has rather stimulated an almost insatiable demand for it (p. 89).In Photography and Flight the late Denis Cosgrove, widely-revered professor of geography at the University of California, LosAngeles, and William L. Fox, Director of the Center forArtþ Entertainment at the Nevada Museum of Art, explore theorigins of our fascination with all things overhead and aerial. Thevolume is part of the ‘Exposures’ series that explores the richhistory of photography from diverse thematic perspectives. Expo-sures promises engaging, accessible text, intriguing insights, andsome 80 images in each book in the series. On each score, Cosgroveand Fox deliver: this beautifully produced book contains some ofthe most stunning photographs of the planet seen from varyingheights overhead and at oblique angles.Cosgrove and Fox consider the early history of photographyfrom hot-air balloons and fixed platforms to hand-held cameratechnology and powered flight in the early twentieth century. Asexpected, military demands lay behind innovative forms ofsurveillance. Lincoln’s army sent up tethered air balloons in 1862,although the practice ended when Confederate sharp-shooterspeppered the billowing targets with fire. Nonetheless, the militaryvalue to commanders on the ground of a synoptic aerial view of thebattlefield was demonstrable and, by the time of the Great War,film speeds and camera shutters had so improved that aerialreconnaissance became a novel and deadly weapon of war. In theearly days pilots dangled hand-held cameras over the cockpit, butthe resultant shaky images were of limited tactical value, and suchHeath-Robinson approaches were soon abandoned in favour ofinnovative techniques such as stereoscopic cameras that relied ongravity-fed film magazines mounted on the fuselage of aeroplanes.In successive leaps, Cosgrove and Fox move from the camera atwar to the evolution of aerial photography in archaeology. An oddconflation perhaps, but the British military alone produced 6.5million photographs in the last year of the First World War, andmany of those taken over ancient Mesopotamia or Macedoniarevealed cities and sites long-unnoticed on the ground. In a fasci-nating elision between archaeology and surveillance, Cosgrove andFox explain how military reconnaissance and government projectswere instrumental in catalysing these and other photographicinnovations in the field. Through engaging narrative and stunningphotographs they explore pivotal historical moments in whichaerial photography began to establish itself as an essential tool,building to the apotheosis of high-altitude photography taken fromrockets and spy planes during the Cold War and the Cuban MissileCrisis.However, the book ranges over more than the political land-scape. In addition to providing valuable insights into the use ofaerial imagery for mapping, planning, and mining, the final sectionexplores aerial photography’s impact on landscape design and itsvalue as art. Here the pivotal role of Terry Evans is noted. Shegraduated from photographing virgin prairie ecosystems to takingair-borne photos that revealed the vast, emptied landscapes of theGreat Plains. Not only interested in the varied beauty of theirnatural and anthropogenic abstract patterns, Terry was also capti-vated by the interrelations that occur at the boundary between theabstract and the specific, where some of the most stunningartworks can be found. Ever since the Vorticists in England and theFuturists in Italy (p. 33) took to the air, artists have found inspira-tion through spatial liberation. Their creative works stretch fromthe sublime to the quixotic; the latter neatly exemplified by EdRuscha’s typology of overhead images of Los Angeles parking lots.Striking a blow against the Ansel Adams school of heroicisedmountainscapes, Ruscha’s poetically bleak shots of the horizontalsprawl of the American city became the foundational aesthetic inthe ‘New Topographics’ (p. 126).The permissive explorations of such photographic artists asDavid Maisel, Michael Light, and Laura Kurgen conclude this study.Following in the aerial footsteps of Ruscha, Maisel takes photo-graphs of the Los Angeles topography from10,000 feet, reversing itsopalescent light by printing his images in negative so that the palesky becomes ominously black, buildings appear white e ‘hollowedout as if by bombs’ (p. 134) e and the freeways become windingarteries, lending an overall impression of apocalypse summarized inthe title of Maisel’s series Oblivion. As Cosgrove and Fox point out,their ‘sunshine and noir’ iconography pays no homage to theconvention of mapping. They refuse to offer conciliatory means oforientation. Instead they decouple us from the familiar and force usto approach the urban on new, if uncannily familiar, terms.Paul GoughUniversity of the West of England, Bristol, UKdoi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.008John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contestamong Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade.New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009, xxi þ 472 pages, US$35.00 hardcover.In the mid-1990s a traveling exhibit called ‘Crossroads Alaska’was circulating around Alaska. It was an abbreviated version ofa massive Smithsonian Institution exhibition called ‘Crossroads ofContinents’ which represented the history and culture of Siberian,Aleut, Yupik, and Inupiat people around the Bering Sea. Majornewspapers had covered the Smithsonian project as geopoliticaltheatre: considerable international cooperation had been requiredto assemble 550 artefacts from museums in the Soviet Union,Canada, and the US. But for Alaskans it carried other significance aswell. The exhibit showed that, until the twentieth century, theBering Strait had served as a point of connection rather than a lineof division. It demonstrated that Alaska had been a nodal point inglobal trade routes, not the periphery that many perceived it to beover the last century. It was as if Alaska had been moved close tocenter-stage in the annals of world history.This monograph by John Bockstoce builds on that theme,revealing how the Bering Strait carried a great deal of trafficbetween North America and Asia in recent centuries. Indeed theauthor had contributed to the volume that had accompanied theexhibit, Crossroads of Continents, edited by William Fitzhugh andAron Crowell (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). Bockstoce is anindependent scholar with a DPhil from the University of Oxford.Sometime curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, he haswritten a number of titles drawing on four decades of fieldwork andresearch about the region. Few if any scholars are more familiarwith English-language journals from early exploratory andcommercial vessels that passed through the Bering Strait.Bockstoce new book, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North, iswritten and marketed as the first comprehensive history of the furtrade around the Bering Strait. Throughout the text BockstoceReviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 484e497 495

Review of: Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight. London, Reaktion Books, 2010

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Review of: Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight. London, Reaktion Books, 2010

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