prettymaps (paris) by Aaron Straup Cope

Good day collectors! It's Sara with our fourth edition from Aaron Straup Cope and Stamen Design: prettymaps (paris). PARIS! And I couldn't be more excited--not only because this print is gorgeous but also because in a few short days, Jen and I will be flying across the Atlantic and wandering the very streets drawn here for Paris Photo, visiting with friends from near and far, and of course, looking at lots and lots of photography.

Traveling that far to see and celebrate art and friends, easily, is not entirely unlike prettymaps--they're both remarkable vestiges of the way we live now. The gravity of the former is usually downplayed; we're generally casual about the ability to cross thousands of miles of open sea in a matter of hours. That is--unless you're Simon Winchester. Winchester, it seems, knows the Atlantic like Aaron Straup Cope and Stamen know maps. (This sounds like a stretch, I know, but please bear with me!)

Last week I heard him waxing about the Atlantic on NPR, distinguishing it from all the other seas in a gravelly voice: It is a gray and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind's eye is thick with trawlers lurching... its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.

For certain, (I hope!) our voyage from New York to Paris will not be the intimate experience with the sea that Winchester shares; it will simply be "the hop across the pond" that describes Transatlantic travel today. Most of us will never have the sort of visceral knowledge that Winchester has. The Atlantic's actual power, its depth and breadth, are reduced to metaphor, and remain unknowable.

Likewise, the beauty of prettymaps (paris) and its sister prints, (sfba), (la) and (nyc), coyly shadows the importance and immensity of the information they're highlighting. I have admittedly struggled to describe exactly what they are and how they are made. But, in a way, they too, like the Atlantic, are unfathomable to a lot of us. While we may be familiar with the sources of the information they're generated from--Flickr and OSM--are responsible for creating much of it, and can see how it's all done, the sheer volume of this information is something mind-bending.

If you go to the prettymaps site and type in your address, it may take a while for the image to load. Knowing that the web usually works that fast, you can begin to think about just how much information prettymaps is compiling. SO MUCH. While it'll work for you in Safari and Firefox, it's really designed to function in browsers that aren't even out there for us to use yet. We're living in the future but Aaron and Stamen are way ahead of us.

Don't let the poppy fields of color and neon streets in prettymaps (paris) fool you. They belie a vast source of information and knowledge that we're just beginning to see the depths of, let alone realize the power of and uses for. But, we can thank Aaron and Stamen for putting it out there for us--it's the beginning of a whole new way of knowing the world around us (and its many seas).