As late as 1952, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White – who had flown in a combat mission over North Africa in 1943 as the first accredited female war correspondent – could say of her photograph “San Jacinto Monument From a Helicopter, Texas”: “The San Jacinto pylon seems to hurl you down its shaft with almost physical force. You get an upside-down perspective to which man and camera have not yet accustomed themselves.” Commercial air travel was just entering its first major phase in the early 1950s, but we soon accustomed ourselves to the upside-down perspective quite thoroughly.

The first aerial photograph was taken from a hot air balloon over the French countryside in 1858. But “Overhead/Underfoot: The Topographical Perspective in Photography,” a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum made up of some 30 works from the permanent collection, picks up the story after World War II, with Harold Edgerton’s “Untitled (M.I.T. at Night-Aerial View)” (c. 1950). Edgerton, a student at MIT in the 1930s, developed stroboscopic photography – syncing the flash with the shutter – for high-speed and stop-motion cameras. The military employed this technology during the war for aerial reconnaissance missions tracking troop movements in Europe. It is unclear what he flew in to take the MIT image, in which campus buildings glow almost eerily in light reflected from the photographer’s flash.

An aerial vantage does not necessarily entail shooting from a plane or helicopter, though this selection does seem to favor static subjects over depictions of movement. For instance, Ray K. Metzker’s “Frankfurt, Germany (Kayak),” appears to have been taken from a point fairly close to its subject, a bridge perhaps. Yet even this sporting image is formally composed in black-and-white: The kayak’s pointed bow defines an elongated triangle in the dark water; the paddle, laid perpendicularly on the hull, suggests the boat is at rest. Gabriel Orozco’s color “Marble Game on Rotating Field” (1996) makes a humorous allusion to the view from an airplane, although it was obviously taken from a high rooftop. A flock of pigeons stands on a somewhat lower roof, and seems to occupy the same plane as pigeon-sized children playing in a dirt field marked off by stones.

The toy-like scale of human existence afforded by an overhead perspective allowed Ed Ruscha to investigate the patterns and structures of urban life. In 1967 he hired a helicopter to document parking lots in Los Angeles. What he found, in such pictures as “5000 W. Carling Way” (1967), was the asphalt rectangles stood out like abstract paintings in the quilt-works of our cities.

Today, many people forget how the first images of the Earth as seen from the moon both shocked the public and came to symbolize – largely through the picture of Earth reproduced on the cover of “The Whole Earth Catalogue” – the ways in which 1960s counterculture reoriented our view of nature. Unfortunately, this show does not include any photographs taken from space, but it still underscores the role aerial perspective assumed in our altered relationship to the landscape and the land.

Certain artists in the 1960s, interested in architectural renderings as well as architecture, conceived of Earthworks art with what the wall text calls an “aboveground viewpoint” – “many of these massive sculptural interventions with the earth could only be viewed fully from midair.” In order to plan their Earthwork pieces, Michael Heizer, in 1969, coupled a picture of a hole dug in the desert with a watercolor rendering. James Turrell, in “Site Plan, Roden Crater II” (1990), made ink drawings directly on an overhead shot of a volcano crater.

Other photographers united the aesthetic possibilities of the overhead perspective to overtly political purposes. Emmet Gowin captured the uncomfortable beauty of environmental degradation in the noxious pools that bloom like mold in “Aeration Pond, Toxic Water Treatment Facility, Pine Bluff, Arkansas” (1989). Toxic constellations also decorate the red water – conveniently providing a visual rhyme with the rusting carcasses of nearby vehicles – in “Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Brave 20 Bombing Range, Nevada” (1986), a Richard Misrach photograph that simultaneously strikes out against environmental destruction, war, and the aerial surveillance technologies used to guide bombs in war.

You can tell from virtually all the titles cited above that the topographical perspective is most often harnessed to a documentary approach. And documentary, whether motivated by history, aesthetics, or politics, is generally an earnest affair. Because of this, the standouts in this show are, to my eye, those like Mr. Orozco’s picture, which poke fun at our irrepressible urge to index the world. Abelardo Morell’s “Map of North America” (1996) shows a crumpled map on a tabletop – seen from above in black and white – with a faux lake rising in its center. Vik Muniz’s “Brooklyn (Spiral Jetty After Smithson)” is a photograph of a tabletop model of Robert Smithson’s famous example of Earthworks art.

Both Mr. Morell’s and Mr. Muniz’s works turn expectations upside down and reverse assumptions without ever leaving the studio. In the end, this is what comes across most forcefully in the Whitney’s trenchant little show: Now that we’re well adjusted to the aerial view, it has become a metaphor for topsy-turvy thinking. We don’t need an airplane to upend our earthbound ways.

Until September 25 (945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, 212-570-3676).