Alexander Heilner

  • Projects
    • Draining the Colorado
    • The New Arctic
    • Last Cold Days
    • Imperial Water
    • Welcome Home
    • Synthetic Truth
    • E-470: Eastern Frontier
    • Development By Design
    • Biosphere 2
    • Extraction / Abstraction
    • Interweaving
    • Land Marks
    • Encyclopedia of NYC
    • Microbes
    • Leaving New York
    • Johns Hopkins Hospital
    • The Great Baltimore Fire
    • Landscapes by Night
    • Raleigh 2000
    • 47 (forty-seven) FRAMES
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Aerial Landscapes

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    • Dubai
    • Intrepid Potash Mine
    • Las Vegas
    • Mines
    • Roads and Railroads
    • San Francisco Bay
    • The Great Salt Lake
    • Urban Development
    • Water and Land Forms
  • Project Statement »
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, U.A.E.
Redwood City, California
Cape Coral, Florida
Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana
Great Salt Lake, Utah
California Aqueduct, Lancaster, California
Black Rock City, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Westwater, Utah
Fremont, Californina
The World, Dubai, U.A.E.
Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, U.A.E.
Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, U.A.E.
The Palm Jumeirah, the first of Dubai's major artificial archepelegos.
Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, U.A.E.
The Palm Jumeirah, the first of Dubai's major artificial archepelegos.
Emirates Estates, Dubai, U.A.E.
Emirates Hills luxury housing development.
Emirates Estates, Dubai, U.A.E.
The Jumeirah Islands luxury housing development.
Emirates Estates, Dubai, U.A.E.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Aurora, Colorado
Aurora, Colorado
Central Park, Denver, Colorado
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Emirates Estates, Dubai, U.A.E.
Montmarie Golf Course
Cape Coral, Florida
Cape Coral, Florida
Near Rotonda, Florida
Near Rotonda, Florida
Cape Coral, Florida
Cape Coral, Florida
Cape Coral, Florida
Houston, Texas
Port Sulphur, Louisiana
Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana
White Marsh, Maryland
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Intrepid Potash Mine, near Moab, Utah
Fremont, Californina
San Jose, California
Menlo Park, California
Lancaster, California
Mine Tailings, Sahuarita, Arizona
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Antelope Island Causeway, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Ogden, Utah
Irrigation Canal, Imperial Valley
Water use across the Western United States is facing increasingly high demand, due to growing populations, higher standards of living, and the effects of climate change. Agricultural Irrigation of the Imperial Valley is the single biggest use of the Colorado River, and thus an epicenter for questions about how to preserve and manage fresh water in the coming years.
Castle Valley, Utah
Lofoten, Norway
Plans are underway to permit drilling of oil and natural gas immediately off the coast of Lofoten, a region of Norway beloved for its dramatic, mountanous landscapes. Local towns have become a major hub of environmental activism throughout the country.
Westmorland, California
Beckley, West Virginia
Alta, West Virginia
Sulpher Springs, West Virginia
Palisades Parkway, Alpine, New Jersey
The Meadowlands, Kearney, New Jersey
Las Vegas, Nevada
Houston, Texas
Houston, Texas
The World, Dubai, U.A.E.
Houston, Texas
Shipping Channel, Houston, Texas
Poplar Island, Maryland
Mexicali and The All American Canal
The US border with Mexico is clearly delineated. Mexicali, a city of 700,000 people sits on the south side, while California's Imperial Valley agricultural region lies to the north of the fence.
The Coachella Canal
The Coachella Canal is a 122-mile aqueduct that conveys Colorado River water for irrigation northwest from the All-American Canal to the Coachella Valley north of the Salton Sea in Riverside County, California.
Southeast Shore, Salton Sea
As agricultural water use becomes more efficient, the runoff into the Salton Sea is being depleted, leaving a century of toxic materials to dry along its shores as it recedes.

Project Statement

For 25 years I have been photographing the interaction between natural and human-built elements in our surroundings. This obsession has often focused on the structural, and the inadvertently aesthetic aspects of these entanglements, including aerial imagery of mineral mines, railroads, housing developments, and other large-scale human infrastructure.

But in recent years, some of the most compelling “new” landscapes have been explicitly defined by the economics of their development. These places are not discovered, claimed, nor even cultivated as in centuries past. They are now designed, with bold and deliberate physical attributes, whose aesthetics are driven by a desire to appeal to a customer – the homeowner or investor who will buy the newly developed land.

This phenomenon has been pushed to its most dramatic extremes in places where land was previously empty, and the cost of physical space was minimal. Cape Coral, Florida began as a family-owned development project in the 1950s, and has now grown into the largest network of artificial canals in the world – almost entirely for the benefit of upper-middle-class single-family residential properties. More recently, the developers of Las Vegas and its surroundings have gone to extreme measures to sculpt and irrigate the desert, to support a population that would not be sustainable without this elaborate infrastructure. In the United Arab Emirates, the developer-rulers of Dubai have spent the last two decades building new land forms offshore, in the shapes of palm fronds, and even a depiction of “The World” – allowing wealthy investors to purchase their own small pieces of these designer landscapes

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