Looking at the Planet from Above Changes Everything

enRoute Where did the idea for Overview begin?

Benjamin Grant In 2013, I was working at a consulting firm in New York City. It was a wonderful place with a lot of smart people, but no one was really sharing ideas. I decided to start a space club at my office, thinking it was a good way to get people talking about something other than work for once. But in the midst of preparing a talk for space club about satellites and how satellites work, I discovered that I had the ability to create these overhead images.

At first, I was taking them from the public domain using the Apple Maps service but then I had this amazing discovery that these images were out there and could be treated as photography – just adding a different level of artistry to them.

I had learned about the idea known as “the overview effect” (which has been the underlying mission of the project from the very beginning) and wanted to inspire this psychological awakening that astronauts have from this vantage point of the Earth. They see our planet floating in space and they get this new definition of what home is and what it means to be a human being. That was very profound for me.

ER What do you think people can learn by viewing the planet from this vantage point?

BG There’s something inherently intriguing and powerful about looking at the world this way. Aerial photography has been around for decades but there’s something that is fascinating about scale and perception when you zoom out.

We’ve always guided our stories to curate the world and showcase something that begins with a “wow” moment followed by the “a–ha” when they read the description. It was cool to see from the very beginning that it had this kind of infectious grasp on people’s creativity and imagination.

ER What do you look for in an image?

BG From the very beginning, we focused on the man–made world. Guided by storytelling, we looked at themes like transportation or ways humans were innovating. The ideal combination is finding an image that pulls you with geometric shapes or colours and interesting subject matter.

ER What kinds of imagery do you find resonate most strongly with your audience? Why do you think that is?

BG If I had to break it down to one category, I’d say imagery of cities. Philosophically, it is interesting that we’re fascinated with the things we have created. But I think there’s also – and this connects to travel – cities and places that people love and that they’ve been to before and they have such a strong feeling for. Cities like Paris, New York, London, Los Angeles, places where people have been that they see in this brand–new way. Even if you’ve explored the streets of Paris or walked around New York City, when you see it all at once from this grand scale, it takes on this whole new meaning and connects you to other people.

ER What do you think that Overview reveals about the world?

BG If you can view it without a value judgment and just think about cities as they exist and how they’ve been these organisms that have grown and been planned and evolved over hundreds of years, they’re kind of this basic component of our civilization. Cities are only going to become more popular and denser in the future, so they’re a challenge we need to face in an ever–growing, ever–complex world.

There’s a lot of ingenuity that goes into it that can be appreciated through satellite photography and that we hope can inspire people to create a better world. Above all, I think that’s what this project is able to accomplish – getting people to learn about things that they never knew of before or to see them in a new way.