Bernhard Lang's view from above

Munich-based photographer Bernhard Lang's photos of humanity at rest - skiing, sailing, swimming or just lying around - have an eerie remove to them. The viewer can't actually tell if the photographer is 300 feet above or perhaps 3,000 feet. Lang says he's obsessed with finding what he calls "the ideal distance - the point where humans and nature could live together in a perfect match."

It's an obsession that's taken him on a two-year journey across the world from Siberia to the Sahara - mostly by light aircraft. His large format camera photos capture the chaos of mankind in a natural environment - the disorder of beach towels laid out on a lakeside; and the order and pattern created by snow-capped trees and lines of corn in a field. Whatever the personal concerns of his subjects far below, looking at them from so far above tends to render them literally insignificant.