The Late American Space

by Hervé Kempf

MacLean "describes for us, with neither animosity nor complacency, how America has changed in a generation, spreading everywhere the tentacles of a life based on the car, which ends up eating space even as it isolates human beings. (Photo: Alex MacLean / "Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point")

    Alex MacLean
    "Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point"
     Abrams, New York: October 2008
     336 pages

    We regret to inform you that the American myth has given up the ghost. It had been fashioned by the anxious wonder of generations of Europeans discovering this unexplored continent, unlimited space just made for every kind of adventure. That has vanished, devoured by shopping centers, golf courses, residential areas, parking lots, hangars, factories. America was empty; now it is full. It was infinite; now it's restricted. It was open; now it's divided into grids.

    One felt this conclusion ripen over the course of trips, as one looked at pictures, like a proof the contours of which slowly emerge in the developing bath of a photo lab. Now it's achieved the stage of final clarity, that is, of revelation.

    The agent for this operation of elucidation is Alex MacLean, an aerial photographer by trade, whose simultaneously superb and surgical snapshots draw up the death certificate for the naive age of the United States. His book's title, "Over" is as clear as its double meaning: "over" as in the photographer covering his subject as he flies over it and "over" as in "the game is over." What game? That of the infinite, of the inexhaustible horn of abundance, of the pioneers' wagons traveling across the plains at a slow mule's pace, of cars rushing by for hours across the desert, of the solitary meditations of Thoreau and Abbey, of the solar wanderings of Kerouac or Lolita.

http://www.truthout.org/102208E