Looking at a countryside horizontally, you see what would be represented in your classic landscape picture. If you tilt your view by 90° and look straight down, what you see is something that could be appropriately represented in a map – except for the scale of course. Scale and detail would rather be a matter of distance from the ground then.
There are several examples for this kind of perpendicular view in this blog, and the feature these pictures share is a reduction in or even absence of perspective.
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Further Reading
Gottfried Boehm, “Offene Horizonte”, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2007.
empire of lights 
Interesting concept, Tobias. Food for thought. The image works so well on an abstract level that I would not have thought to relate it to landscape – horizontal or otherwise. Intriquing.
Thank you, Cindy.