Evaporation ponds at the Moab potash mine in Moab, Utah, which produces muriate of potash, a salt used in fertilizers.
Now a coffee table book, Overview explores the way humans have—or have not—shaped and molded the land we live on. The first eight chapters feature images of the places where people Harvest, Live, Play, Extract, Move, Waste, Power, and Design.
Sun Lakes, a planned community in Arizona
“The ‘Overview Effect’ has been at the core and inspiration of this project from the very beginning,” says Grant. “I learned about [it] from a video that a friend sent me about three or four months before this project began, which was called Overviews. There are interviews with a number of astronauts—philosophers—who are speaking about this psychological shift that astronauts experience after spending significant time in outer space and after they have the opportunity to see, not only the planet as a whole, but how fragile the planet is. How interconnected everything is, how the things that occur on one side of the planet impact everything else on the other side of the planet.”
Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, the largest religious monument in the world
“I think the project aims to tackle this idea of sharing the perspective with more people in that it’s fostering appreciation for the beauty of our planet, and also how fragile it is and how we need to protect it. I think that it definitely changed me,” says Grant.
The Eixample District in Barcelona, Spain
This Barcelona neighborhood designed by Ildefons Cerdà is one of many examples of remarkable urban planning depicted in Overview. “When you look at major cities that you may have visited before and kind of walked through or moved throughout, you don’t necessarily understand the larger plan that is in place,” says Grant.
This Iron Ore Mine Tailings Pond in Negaunee, Michigan contains waste from the Empire and Tilden Iron Ore Mines
“My knowledge of all the things that have been created, or all the things that are going on, or all the systems that we’ve put into place on the planet, and how it’s impacting the planet, is probably something I would have never learned if I hadn’t started this project. So I think that it not only expanded my inquisitiveness about the world, but also fostered an appreciation for the beauty of the world, and how it is so important for us to collaborate and work together to protect the environment,” says Grant.
Port Hercules, the only deep-water port in Monaco
Shadegan Lagoon, near Musa Bay in Iran.
“The last chapter of the book is called ‘Where We Are Not,’ which is in contrast to the other ones that come before it,” says Grant. “It’s really cool to look at these places that were formed over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years, like mountains or deserts, or lakes that have dried up—you name it—that are being contrasted to the development you see in the other chapters, which happened really within the past two decades or hundred years or two hundred years.”
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