Aerial photography

(′e·rē·əl fə′täg·rə·fē)

(engineering) The making of photographs of the ground surface from an aircraft, spacecraft, or rocket. Also known as aerophotography.

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Aerial photography is a hybrid of two separate technologies, aviation and photography. A variety of combinations have been used, which have proved useful to a wide range of fields, scientific, military, and artistic. Aerial views generally adhere to one of two types: the direct vertical, producing a rational, linear representation useful in cartography, and the oblique horizontal; resulting in a more descriptive, pictorial image. Although aerial photography usually implies air-to-ground views, it can also include air-to-air images of aircraft, cloud formations, and other meteorological phenomena.

At the time of photography's invention, there already existed a tradition of aerial landscape representation: the bird's-eye view, common in 17th-century France. Probably based on views from towers or hills, further enhanced by manipulations of the artist, bird's-eye views incorporated both cartographic data and picturesque detail. With the announcement of the daguerreotype process in Paris in 1839, aerial photography was immediately proposed. A lithograph from that year by Maurisset entitled Daguerréotypomanie lampooned the hype over the new invention, placing photography in the air via the hot-air balloon, an invention of the Montgolfier brothers from 1784. The heavy equipment and long exposure times required by the daguerreotype, however, made photography unpracticable from the unstable platform of the balloon. Not until 1858, the year Nadar loaded the faster wet-plate process aboard a balloon, was an aerial photograph achieved—a view of the countryside around Bièvre, France, that has not survived. The first extant aerial photograph was made in the USA two years later by James Wallace Black (1825-96), who also paired wet plate and balloon to realize a series of photographs of Boston. Nadar succeeded in making the first aerials of Paris in 1868 from a balloon tethered near the Arc de Triomphe. A wood-engraved version of the photograph appeared in Le Petit Figaro, with boulevard names given so that viewers could identify the scene.

Advances in both photography and aviation encouraged other combinations. The invention in 1869 of the electrically released shutter allowed airborne cameras to be operated from the ground. Kites, or kite-trains, soon became a common platform. This was the method used by George Lawrence (d. 1938) in a series of views of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. The dry-plate process, in general use by the mid-1880s, made photographing from balloons more feasible, as the film speed was faster and the process less cumbersome. Photographers thus ventured higher, liberated by lighter, less complicated procedures. Cecil Shadbolt (1859-92) photographed London from 610 m (2, 000 ft) in 1883; Gaston Tissandier (1843-99), author of La Photographie en ballon (1885), took high-altitude aerials of Paris in 1885. Light, flexible roll-film, introduced by Kodak in the late 1880s, was sent up via rockets and, oddly enough, pigeons; these methods were patented in Germany during the first decade of the 20th century. It was aeroplanes, however, invented in 1903, that revolutionized aerial photography. These provided a more stable platform and were easier to navigate into position. A Pathé cameraman took the first photograph from an aeroplane (actually a still from a cinematograph film strip) in 1908 as Wilbur Wright's passenger in a flight over Le Mans, France. The results were published in La Vie au grand air, the French sports illustrated.

The 20th century witnessed a dramatic expansion of aerial photography, for military, aerial-survey, and archaeological purposes. Aerial infrared and colour images have assisted studies of geology and plant ecology by identifying differences in moisture content and vegetation. Zoologists have been able to monitor wildlife populations and migrations through aerial observation. Aerial imagery is perhaps most useful in urban planning and land management, providing specialists with information on population density, travel patterns, toxicity of sites, and other land-use factors.

In the visual arts, aerial photography has been engaged for a variety of expressive purposes. As early as 1911, Karl Struss began photographing New York from atop recently constructed skyscrapers, as did Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose 1913 book New York from its Pinnacles proposed an aesthetic of modernism through its dramatic use of vertiginous views and optical distortions. In Russia, where a search for a language of modernism was under way by the late 1910s, artists such as Alexander Rodchenko took up the aerial view as a symbol of the political and cultural transformations envisioned by communism. Similarly, German Bauhaus artists recognized the potential of the vertical view for revolutionizing vision through the deconstruction of space, a process linked to progressive values of the period. The tradition of the extreme angle proposed by aerial photography found new potential in America in the abstract photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, whose Equivalents series—cloud abstractions made during the 1920s—shifted the meaning of photographic abstraction from larger social and political causes to the expression of individual identity.

Since the explosion of the photography market during the 1970s, aerial photographs made for military or other purposes have often been reassigned to an art context. Such has been the case with Edward Steichen's photographs taken during the Second World War. This duality between aesthetics and utility is consciously exploited by contemporary practitioners, notably Yann Arthus-Bertrand, William Garnett, Emmet Gowin, Patricia Macdonald (see attached feature), and Alex MacLean, who, to varying degrees, work to create aesthetic imagery out of raw topographical data in order to pose questions related to perception, the environment, and human industry.

— Kevin Moore

Featured article: Conceptual Landscapes.

Bibliography

• St Joseph, J. K. S. (ed.), The Uses of Air Photography: Nature and Man in a New Perspective (1966).
• Newhall, B., Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space (1969).
• Martin, R. (ed.), The View from Above: 125 Years of Aerial Photography (1983).
• Baker, S., ‘George Lawrence: A Giant in Kite Aerial Photography’, Kitelines, 11 (1994).
• Corner, J., and MacLean, A. S., Taking Measures across the American Landscape (1996).
• Arthus-Bertrand, Y., Brown, L., et al., The Earth from the Air (2nd edn. 2002). ‘Photography and Flight’, History of Photography, 28 (2004)

A photographic print or picture of an object, or of a source of radiation, on the earth’s surface, developed from a film previously exposed in an airborne vehicle. In narrower terms, it is the act of taking photographs of objects on the ground from the air by aerial cameras. In this category, there are four types of aerial photographs: vertical, oblique, fan, and panoramic. Vertical photography is used for mapping, locating objects that are camouflaged, and getting the exact scale of objects. It is the main source of reconnaissance. Oblique photography is used for tactical purposes and involves taking photographs by cameras looking sideways or through nose camera(s). Fan photography uses a combination of vertical and oblique camera installation. A panoramic photograph covers a strip of land from one horizon to the other. The other types of aerial photographs are infrared photographs, radarscope photographs, video photographs, and thermal photographs.



A vertical aerial photograph.



Various types of aerial photographs.

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