Earth from the Air, 365 Days

French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand can be forgiven for looking down on the world when his latest global survey, The Earth from the Air, 365 Days bears such bold witness to the variety of our lives and our planet. More compact than the original The Earth from the Air, but somehow no less heavy, Arthus-Bertrand's glossy portrait-diary of privileged panoramas formalises the concept of looking at a single piece of art each day by arranging yet another stunning array of bird's-eye glimpses of the lives we lead, and the multitude we don't and never will. His now-recognisable preferences are much in evidence, such as a person or animal to give scale or reference to a shot (the relationship between man and beast greatly informs his more traditional portrait work, such as Dogs and Cats, local markets, primitive enclosures and dwellings, seaweed, water as transport, life-sustainer, destroyer and habitat and an irresistible attraction to the flamingo's brilliant hue. This time, even greater emphasis is placed on verbal context for each image, with a predominantly social commentary which acts as a moral tax on the visual delights. Oceans are overfished, rainforests destroyed, but Nature can play as malevolent a role, through hurricanes, or volcanoes, which feature prominently both as beautiful perils or as forces of geological shape. Indeed, perhaps the most beautiful photographs reveal tortured, sinewy geological formation, showing how much our world is formed by the fragile strength of its own internal forces and resources as much as humankind deforms it. Images stick in the mind: mangrove clearings in New Caledonia in the shape of a heart; stilt houses on the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela--literally Little Venice; an abandoned town near Chernobyl. Some exist aesthetically, some metaphorically, while others provoke, but almost without exception, they draw in the browser to contemplative delight. Textured works of art, daily balm for the vertiginous, The Earth from the Air, 365 Days is manna from heaven, and sure beats the Pirelli calendar --David Vincent

View other editions of Earth from the Air, 365 Days.
View books by Herve Le Bras, Christian Balmes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Fantastic - A Must - Rated
This is just simply a fantastic book.

The world is a truly amazing place and this book makes you want to get out there and see it.

Photographs are excellent and capture the moment exactly.

As another review has put, it is the best coffee table book you will find.

Go out and buy it, you will not regret it.

Itýs above the rest - Rated
This book is fabulous. I have it lying around in the living room and just look at a few of the pictures at a time - this way it takes a while to read and every picture can be savoured. There is a picture for every day of the year and a couple of paragraphs about each picture that gives some background to the picture and ties it into the theme of the book - Ecology. The beginning of each month has a short essay by a scientist or similar subject matter expert about a particular ecological subject. I personally have not been reading them very closely!

The pictures are obviously why people buy this book and they certainly impress - they range from the famous (Venice) to eye-opening (The Hiroshima memorial building) to the whimsical (tyre tracks on an airport runway)! Every picture is wonderful and even if one does not appeal there are 365 other pictures to drink in. A nice feature is that the Lat/Long of each picture is shown so the very adventurous can go and see the locations for themselves!

All in all, a brilliant book to leave lying around and to sample whenever you have a spare five minutes. Drink in the wonderful pictures and then fantasise about visiting the locations in person. Brilliant.

366 Days Of the World, in a book 366 million times smaller! - Rated
What a great book. Picked it up whilst in Sussex Stationers one day and could not put it down, was forced by myself to buy it there and then. Anybody that is remotely interested in the natural world outside of their own, i am sure will feel the same way i do about this remarkable collection of photographs from around our world. From the slums of Rio to the idillic cottage in central England, this book shows and tells a great story, one of supreme diversity and extremes of nature.

Yeah, whatever.... - Rated
Really nice book, if a tad expensive. Basically its 365 aerial photo's. Once you've read it all you can cut out and frame the photo's which is what I did!!!!

The Medium is the Message - Rated
Almost pointless to review this book of lavish photographs on a site where you can't see the images, but take this one on trust: this is the most beautiful book in the world, ever. The photographs, one for each day of the (leap) year, are stunning aerial shots of the most striking features of every country in the world. It outscores its sister volume, The Universe: 365 Days, in sheer variety, believe it or not. Leave it open on your table, turn a page every day and you have a year's worth of wonder and fascination. Yesterday I had ice floes in northern Canada, near the Arctic Circle - just to the corner of the page, in the middle of one of the great white slabs, is a tiny speck than turns out to be a person. Today it's a village of subsistence living in the Sahara desert, near Timbuktu, where the only thing that makes the crops grow is the manure from the animals they feed with the crops...

Best of all, it's not just showy natural phenomena that catch the cameraman's eye - a lattice of working-class housing in Belfast or the scarred and crazed surface of a highway in Kentucky carry just as much interest. The only low point is the occasionally sanctimonious tone of the accompanying text, which invariably switches halfway through each description from telling you what you're seeing to a jeremiad against human beings and how we're wrecking everything. I could have done with more detailed explanations of the images. But you don't have to read the words: just look.