"Untitled (Academy of Arts)," Düsseldorf, 2009/Andreas Gefeller

Ice tracks ramble across a blackened field. Concrete slabs from a Holocaust memorial generate a precise grid pattern. Remnants of a building foundation leave a faint impression. These images lay the groundwork for an inventive collection of contemporary photographs.

Supervisions, the latest volume by German photographer Andreas Gefeller, surveys landscapes and interior spaces with the acute detail seen in images by fellow contemporary German photographer Andreas Gursky. Gefeller, however, upends his tripod, positioning his camera in perfect perpendicular position to his subjects. With enviable results, Gefeller carries on the tradition of bird’s-eye-view imagery launched by the French photographer Felix Nadar over one hundred years ago.

The substantial photographs—the largest is more than 12 feet long—read as maps, architectural drawings, and archaeological records that document communal spaces.  Gefeller captures beaches, forests, parking lots, offices and cemeteries in exacting details, hues and textures. Serialized grids, patterns and repetitions expose both the sameness and variety of the sites.

While the photographs portray unpopulated landscapes, evidence of human activity and human life are plentiful. Beach sands are crowded with footprints, ocean waters are rippling with activity, painted street markings are weathered to faint impressions, urban streets are scarred with graffiti declarations, and tombstones mark the graves of buried ancestors. Viewers imagine the characters that passed through and the activities that transpired.

With flawlessly flat light, the images seem to document the spaces that they depict, yet they record an unreality, an impossible space. Gefeller aims a camera adhered to a boom at the ground and photographs the locations section by section. Therefore, each image is in fact a composite of hundreds of images stitched together by digital means. A space, potentially teeming with people, is imagined as a vacant landscape. Photography, considered the art of recording a solitary split second, is re-visioned by Gefeller, whose painstakingly complex composite images are constructed over long durations of time. In this way, Gefeller considers questions of truth and illusion and the role photography plays in this long-standing debate.

Gefeller’s aerial composites also reverse the relationship between film and photography. Whereas film compiles multiple images—24 per second—to simulate motion, Gefeller reduces multitudes of images—sometimes more than 1,000—to a single image. Gefeller takes motion, activity and chaos, and collapses them to stillness.

His method causes illusory effects that can both add and subtract key elements. A swimming pool, vacant of swimmers, is swirling with activity. Bright yellow leaves encircle an unseen tree. Rows of trees cast elongated shadows, but the actual trees and their branches, the source of the shadows, are absent. And due to the extensive image capture time, the trees’ shadows lengthen and shift reflecting the changing movement of the sun. The interior and exterior spaces of a church and the surrounding cemetery are captured in a single image, as if the roof has been stripped from the building.

The collection’s title has an inherent double meaning. Supervisions suggest the watchful eye of surveillance, the all-knowing perspective from above, as well as “super visions”—enhanced vision, beyond vision, or better than vision. In this way, Gefeller asserts the discovery of a new way of seeing, an original perspective.

"Untitled (Academy of Arts R 209)," Düsseldorf, 2009/Andreas Gefeller

The collection includes sites from the Netherlands, Finland, New York and Hong Kong, but the most fully realized achievements are from Gefeller’s birthplace of Dusseldorf, Germany, and specifically at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts.

The series begins with an architectural floor plan view of an entire level of the renowned art academy, which boasts internationally known professors and graduates, including Andreas Gursky, Gunter Grass, Paul Klee and Gerhard Richter. Lecture halls, studio and critique spaces, and seminar and storage rooms are bound together by hallways crowded with abandoned canvases. The immense photograph, an exacting collage of more than 1,000 images, is followed by a room-by-room study of individual spaces.

The hyper-realistic detail recalls the precision of an excavation. Trace outlines of canvases are scattered with cigarette butts, pens, and bottles. In an active studio space, the floor, with splotches of sprayed and dripped paint, is an unintended Jackson Pollock canvas. The interiors mark the territory of artistic inspiration and innovation.

Writer Gerhard Gluher aptly identifies the distinctiveness of Gefeller’s work when he states, “Absolutely nothing happens in Gefeller’s pictures, according to the classical criteria of narratology, yet they defy inclusion in the traditional canon of photographic documentation.” As time and duration interplay with his meticulous imaging of reality, Gefeller creates a new mode of representation. Thus, residing in a place between fact and fantasy, Gefeller simultaneously documents and invents the worlds around him.

[To see how Gefeller collects his images, watch this Euromaxx video clip.]

Courtesy of Mitch Epstein

In its summer 2009 issue, Granta features a selection of 15 large-format, color images from the collection. (Only the cover is available online; more images are available on Epstein’s site). The subject has been explored before in aerial photographs by Alex MacLean in Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point —straight documentary images that catalog the scale of human excess and consumption—and Emmet Gowin, in Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth, via artistic black and white abstract impressions of the earth’s surface scarred by energy mining. But Epstein’s photographs, shot from streets and public spaces, taken with his feet rooted on the earth, read more vividly as commentary, a decisive critique of society and its relationship to energy and to the planet, “the human conquest of nature at any cost.”

Traveling across America, Epstein visits the full range of energy production sites, from dirty coal to clean wind, and he captures the interaction between these sites and the communities in which they are entrenched.

The series begins with an oil refinery in California. The imposing structure, with its tangle of industrial pipes that shoot into the air like spires, is a modern day fortress. Photographing from across the street, Epstein locates himself as an outsider, a critic scrutinizing his subject—in this instance, a fortification protected by a moat, a barrier of barbed wire. A synthetic American flag, riddled with holes to protect it from the wind, stretches across the refinery’s façade. Epstein directly makes the association of energy production with American power by foregrounding this diminished icon.

The second image illustrates two stacks from a coal power plant in Georgia spewing smoke into the air. Towers and smoke—a visual pairing imprinted on the American psyche—are recalled, not as an image of a country weakened by attack but by a self-inflicted wound.

The third image—which adorns the journal’s cover—juxtaposes the all-American high school football team, an idyll of youth in their patriotic red jerseys, with a pollution-billowing coal power plant hovering over the field. The toxic air they breathe and the poisoned water they drink compromises the health and brawn of these athletes; energy slowly and silently undermines power.

Epstein’s exploration evolves with the continuing association of major symbols of American strength with the sites of energy production and consumption. In California, cattle graze on a brittle, desolate field backgrounded by a hillside wind farm. In West Virginia, a community nestles among the towers of a coal power plant. And in Iowa, a truck stop, boasting images of archetypal Americans in powerful poses on the wall, overflows with the excesses of consumerism.

And in what is perhaps the most curious of the images, golfers tee up on a verdant course set in a desert landscape spotted with wind turbines. In this barren region, water is imported to create an unnatural and impossibly lush field of green, yet at the same time, the wind turbines represent efforts to support sustainable energy. It is a bizarre contradiction, green technology set up against extravagance.

Epstein renders palpable American self-indulgence and immoderation with an image of Las Vegas, where fake pyramids reside alongside tinker-toy towers, pools, palms, and vacationers in decadent repose. And the photographer alludes to extreme weather—a phenomenon heightened by energy exploitation—with images of a battered oil platform off the Alabama coast and the pockmarked surface of the mighty superdome in Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina ravaged both.

Human figures populate his landscapes only sparsely. In Pass Christian, Mississippi, a town decimated by Katrina, a man and woman, in an iconic representation of the creation myth, kneel before their depleted harvest in a grim garden setting, as if being punished for some original sin. And in Midland, Texas, two motorcyclists appear in full latex coverings. Like futuristic warriors, they are armored and wear helmets designed to filter the contaminated air. Thor, the Viking god celebrated for his enormous strength, is brandished across their chests.

Using the 8×10-inch format, Epstein allows the minute details from within the setting to emerge while exposing the broad scope of the expansive landscape. The viewer oscillates between the interior and exterior spaces, ascribing emotions and identifying with characters from within while simultaneously reading the larger terrain with critical perspective.

Each photograph tells a story, and together the photographs convey the complete narrative. Without making environmental prescriptions or political recommendations, Epstein exposes different facets of the same challenge. The evidence mounts, revealing a complex problem that stretches from coast to coast. Together the images represent a clear visualization of a country that fights against its own self-interest.

The collection of images, with its breadth of hypocrisies and tangle of contradictions, poses a question: “How can a society that functions in this way be sustained?” When asked why he made this work, Epstein simply replied, “I have a daughter.”

Reflecting Epstein’s main motivation, the narrative concludes on a cautionary note with a hint of hope. In the final photograph, an image of the Hoover Dam, the hydroelectric triumph of the 1930s, a glimmer of sunlight shines on the horizon, while the “bathtub ring” on the basin surface below signals the retreating waterline of Lake Mead. The image realizes Epstein’s intentions, to expose “the beauty and terror of early twenty-first-century America as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible future.”

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Stephanie Mitchell is a professional photographer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, The Irish Times, Der Spiegel, and TIME magazine.