THE ordered lines of Jerome, Idaho (population: 10,000) start to disintegrate as you approach those parts of town that teeter on the edge of the Snake river canyon. Here the homes are “unregulated and unzoned”, says photographer Michael Light, who took this shot from his own light aircraft.

There seems to be a tension between the advance of civilisation and the untamed wilds. “It represents a kind of apocalyptic divine intervention upon Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a pastoral, agrarian America built on the rationality of the grid,” Light says, “as if the hand of God was a very displeased claw.”

At 1700 kilometres in length, the Snake is the longest tributary of the Columbia river to the north-west. The volcanic activity of the Yellowstone hotspot formed the Snake river basin, and for thousands of years, Native American tribes lived on its banks. Then, from the 19th century on, the landscape started changing under the influence of European settlement, creating the dichotomy so evident in Light’s photograph.

This is one of the images on display as part of the Positive View Foundation’s exhibition , at Somerset House in London from 14 March until 28 April. For more information, go to .

This article appeared in print under the headline “Life on the edge”

This shot was taken by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as part of his study of oil, not just in its industrial and economic context, but also its impacts on our cultural and social lives. The series was sparked by his realisation in the late 1990s that the landscapes he had been photographing existed as a result of the discovery of oil and the invention of the combustion engine. Burtynsky has travelled the world for years to create these large-format, highly detailed scenes that remind us of the scale, breadth and complexity of the planet’s biggest industry.

The physical landscapes altered by the extraction process range from the older oil fields of Belridge in California and the Socar fields of Baku, Azerbaijan, to the Alberta oil sands and refineries in Canada. The photographs document these, alongside the cultural impact of the oil-reliant car, especially in the US, and its supporting infrastructure of road networks, intersections and gas stations. Burtynsky’s images also reveal the aftermath of the industry – the demise of spent reserves; the ships broken and dismantled, mostly by hand, in Chittagong, Bangladesh; the aircraft graveyards in the Arizona desert; and millions and millions of bald tyres.

WEIGHING in at 4 kilograms and standing a proud 22 centimetres tall, this is the world’s first portable digital camera. In 1975, Steve Sasson and his team at Kodak’s Elmgrove plant in Rochester, New York, cobbled it together from existing Kodak parts and other state-of-the-art technology.

Their heady mix included a lens from a Super 8 camera, the early home-movie camera recently popularised in a J. J. Abrams movie of the same name; what was then a new charge-coupled device (CCD) for converting light into digital signals; a digital cassette recorder; and 16 nickel-cadmium batteries. The resulting images were black and white and had a resolution of 10,000 pixels – a mere 0.01 megapixels in today’s parlance.

Actually viewing them was a lot more work, and required heftier equipment. It took 23 seconds for the CCD to record to the cassette. The cassette then had to be removed and placed in a chunky custom-made device (pictured below) that sent the image to a TV set.

The system was truly ahead of its time. When Sasson showed it off to colleagues at Kodak, he was asked: “Why would you want to look at photos on a TV?” But Sasson revealed he was aware of its potential in a 1977 technical report: “The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”