Update: Since February I have indeed stopped this series of imagery posts to Ello. However, this has much to do with my lack of available time to locate, assess and process the images. It was a fun and finite project.

I’ve been posting a bunch of stuff on Ello recently. Mostly it’s big images of farmland, taken from space. The reason I process them and post them is that the view from above can teach us a lot about the dynamics of money and power on the ground. We make a huge impact on the land and on each other as a result.

Hayer, Alberta

Ello is a nice place to put these images because they get a large container. That’s it. That’s the main reason I like it. Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all shrink visual content to ~1/3 of screen width, but obsessively-flat-and-borderless Ello gives it a big window, bigger with a collapsed sidebar.

The spare view

And that lets me focus on things like the shape of cultivated fields or the spread-out pattern of an invasive tree species. Because that stuff — with implications for livelihoods, hunger and ecology — is what matters. It’s nice that Ello is local (for me), and that it’s ad-free and that it’s registered as a public-benefit corporation, but that’s secondary to the layout.

I’ll be keeping up the vertical-perspective storytelling over there in something like digest form, so check it out.