Ratings1
Average rating4
“Jay B. Sauceda is creating a new kind of literature for the state, a visual literature that is as significant and powerful as John Graves’s Goodbye to a River, Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, Edna Ferber’s Giant, or T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star. His compositions accomplish what all great work does—offering a new way of seeing things so familiar that we have stopped seeing them.” —Rick Bass in Texas Monthly On the ground, Texas is a vast patchwork of natural and human landscapes—wide open spaces contrasting with sprawling cities; the watery worlds of rivers, lakes, and coastlines giving way to the arid vistas of plains and deserts. From the air, though, Texas takes on a wholeness that unites the landscapes that people manufacture with the land that nature still sculpts. This is the Texas that Jay B. Sauceda portrays in A Mile above Texas, a book of stunning aerial photographs that document the entire perimeter of the state. Sauceda flew 3,822 miles, over five days in 2015, in a single-engine Cessna. He shot more than 44,000 photos from the plane, via handheld cameras and GoPros attached to the wings. This book presents the very best of those photographs in sections that cover each leg of the trip: Victoria to Marshall, Marshall to Dalhart, Dalhart to El Paso, El Paso to Marfa, and Marfa to Mustang Beach. With fresh views of Texas’s beaches and rivers, woodlands and deserts, cities and farms, A Mile above Texas offers an encompassing view of the state that perhaps only flyers and migratory birds have enjoyed before now.
Reviews with the most likes.
I first saw this book at the Texas Book Festival way back at the end of October, and I've been waiting and waiting for all these days for it to come into the library for me. It arrived yesterday. I was not disappointed.
This is a huge book of huge photos of the Texas borders, taken way up in an airplane. Jay B Sauceda took over 40,000 photos of our 1,254 mile border and this book is the best of what he took.
For this Master Naturalist, it's a comforting book; the land is, surprisingly, quite empty. It's beautiful, too, with sparkling seacoasts and immense rivers and vast deserts and craggy mountains.
It's a lovely look at Texas from the air.