“Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow,” E.B. White wrote in “Here is New York,” his classic 1949 essay. “This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty.”
This ascent over the centuries, through photographs and illustrated maps, from the city’s beginnings as a Dutch settlement to a megalopolis stretching toward the clouds is at the heart of “New York: A Century of Aerial Photography,” recently published by Prestel. Though the city’s other boroughs, and even its neighbor New Jersey, appear in its pages, the book is largely a visual history of Manhattan, with its awe-inspiring symbols, as White put it, of “aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.”
The island’s narrow 2.2-mile width and its “remarkable variety of elements,” notes Peter Skinner, the author, made it an ideal subject for aerial photographers from the earliest days of the medium. “From a greater height, the whole of Manhattan can be captured, with the Upper Bay to the south and the Harlem River to the north both helping frame the island,” Mr. Skinner writes in the book’s introduction.
The first aerial photographs of New York, however, were “not very impressive,” he noted. Smoke from coal fires in the city’s manufacturing districts obscured otherwise picturesque views, and camera technology had not evolved enough to sufficiently compensate for the effects of bumpy flights in propeller-driven aircraft.
Some of the best early aerial views of the city, at the beginning of the 1900s, come courtesy of the U.S. Army, though its compositions were, understandably, more utilitarian than artistic. But as the city became a powerful economic center in the first half of the 20th century, aerial photographers’ ambitions and capabilities rose in tandem, and their images from the sky helped shape the world’s imagination of the booming metropolis. The joy and adventure of that pursuit is perfectly encapsulated in Oscar Graubner’s 1935 photo of the daredevil photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, seen with her camera astride a stainless steel eagle head decoration jutting from the Chrysler Building.
Anecdotally, the book represents the full range of image-making innovations that made increasingly revelatory visions of the city possible, beginning with Joost Hartgers’ 1628 hand-drawn map of New Amsterdam—the first recorded view of the new settlement—and ending with a 2013 photo from the International Space Station, with other notable achievements, including the first aerial color photo of the Statue of Liberty, in between.
“Now it’s a fully established artistic medium, not merely a recording medium. We’ve been driven to great heights of creativity,” Skinner said in an interview.
Seen from thousands of feet up, New York’s inhabitants tend to disappear into the landscape. When they do make their mark, it’s typically during monumental events like the annual New York City Marathon, whose brightly colored throngs Tim Orr captures crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Crowds also appear in Tony Linck’s 1945 photo of celebration of V-E Day in Times Square, and again in a shot outside the New York Stock Exchange in the anxious opening days of the 1929 crash.
While the book does capture something of life in New York, it serves primarily as a history of the city’s rapid development. An image of Columbus Circle in 1924 looks relatively quaint compared to a more recent one in which the newly added Time Warner Center and Trump International Hotel and Tower loom large. A photo of the 1,396-foot residential tower 432 Park Avenue, located just a few avenues east, serves as one of the latest examples of the city’s ceaseless quest for greater heights. Other photos, meanwhile, highlight what the city has lost, including Ebbets Field and the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
New York is one of the most photographed cities in the world — and, according to Instagram, the most geotagged city of 2016 — but, according to those who document it from the air for a living, the task never gets old. Paul Ganun, the director of photography at aerial production company NYONair, whose photos appear in “New York,” says that’s because there’s always something new to discover.
“New York continues to be the most amazing place,” Mr. Ganun said. “Everything’s changing.”
Correction: An earlier version of the caption for picture No. 8 in the accompanying slide show, using information from Prestel Publishing, overstated what is known about when the picture was taken. It was taken sometime after NYU’s Kimmel Center for University Life was completed, in 2003; it was not taken in 1997.
Picture No. 3 in the accompanying slide show, of Park Avenue, was posted in mirror image. The photograph, which showed traffic going in the wrong direction, has been removed.
Follow @teicherj and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.
