Like rats' feet inside the head

Kia ora tatou:

Every so often we need to feed our idea bank, to take fresh look at what we are doing, to put our picture-making concepts under the microscope. Books are a great way to do this. Some are old friends; they reinforce the path we are taking or add to our knowledge. Others are like rats's feet clawing the inside of our heads: they challenge us, ask us to look differently at our picture'making concepts....

For your edification may I present Taking Measures Across the American Landscape by JAmes Corner and Alex S. MacLean.

A reviewer describes it thus:
How we represent the land to ourselves affects the ways in which we value and act upon it, according to landscape architect Corner (Univ. of Pennsylvania). His text accompanies the beautifully suggestive aerial photographs of MacLean (whose previous book was Look at the Land), which document the ways in which we impose shape and meaning on our landscape: Irrigated fields contrast sharply with the surrounding desert; old homesteads, now abandoned, anchored people in an undifferentiated and dangerous landscape--their isolation from one another reflecting American individualism; and wheat fields follow the rolling contours of the land. ``Revealed is the absurd and magnificent ingenuity of American people,'' Corner writes, ``a people enmeshed with yet remote from their land.''

You can read about it here