Over the course of his 45-year career, photographer Alex MacLean has documented various American and European landscapes from the rural to the urban, from the mountains to the beachfront, and from the natural to the manmade. His signature aesthetic straddles the line between informative and abstract. As a certified pilot, MacLean flies his Cessna Skylane 182 plane at a low enough altitude that the features and figures he portrays are still identifiable such as in Green Cab (2010). However, by presenting these familiar landscapes from a bird’s eye perspective his compositions veer towards the abstract and rely on a language of dynamic colors, patterns, and textures rather than strictly adhering to a more straight forward documentation such as in Growing Series: Rejected Tomato Tracks (1990). MacLean’s photographs skillfully and subtly subvert viewer’s expectation of a place not only through an aerial viewpoint of his chosen landscapes but also through his carefully selected subjects and their expression of the profound effects of human intervention on the natural world – both positive and negative.
 
MacLean intentionally selects his subjects to portray the evolution of the land brought about by both natural processes such as a beach erosion and human intervention such as urban development, industrial agriculture, and climate change. Similar to his liminal aesthetic approach, MacLean seems to walk the line between celebration and criticism. By engaging with such loaded and sensitive topics though aesthetically abstracted landscape images MacLean not only offers his audience a shifted perspective on familiar environments from an aesthetic point of view but seems to encourage a similar shift in our vantage points as we approach his images and the issues they depict.