EARTH FROM ABOVE

Yann Arthus-Bertrand shows us the world in a whole new light.

The world looks different from above. Sounds obvious, but you don’t quite realise it until you see it. You can get a sense of that on a plane, but then you get too high, or the clouds move in, or you fall asleep. Unless you own a helicopter, opportunities to see the world from above are fleeting at best. But the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has made his name doing the work for us, circumnavigating the world’s lower atmosphere in all manner of transport seeking out shots that make you go ‘Woah’. In 2009 he brings a new exhibition to New York, appropriately entitled ‘Earth From Above’, that he hopes will do more than startle; Bertrand’s images are inextricably linked to the environmental issues facing humanity today. More pics inside.

Above: a migrating whale off the Valdes peninsula in Argentina.

Below: one of 6,000 uninhabited islands in the Philippines; an Adelie penguin finds itself along on an iceberg; and a scorched palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, built in the 1920s and soon the be reconstructed.