History from on high

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1937151,00.html

A new exhibition in London, UK, looks at some of our more admirable achievements from the air in an exhibition entitled The Past From Above, at the British Museum from November 16 2006 to February 11 2007. There were all taken by Swiss photographer Georg Gerster, who has been photographing from the air since 1963: "He came back from more than 40 years of aerial photography with an exceptional record of monuments as their long-dead creators could only hope to see them from some celestial viewpoint in the afterlife.Pharaoh Ramesses II, for instance, had to be content to imagine the magnificent pattern of the Ramesseum, his mortuary temple dating from the 13th-century BC, from 1,000ft up. He had only his architect's plans and the vast but partial views available from the flat desert ground surrounding it. Visitors to the museum see not only the bird's-eye view, but the striking effects of later history on the monument - and the hundreds of others alongside it in the exhibition."