seeing & being seen

I ought not forget kites.

Arthur Batut, pioneer of kite photography, took the above image of the village of Labrugière in 1896, from a kite. A slow-burning fuse, lit upon launching of the kite, served as a timer for the camera, and a white flag would indicate when the picture had been taken and the kite could be reeled in. In the pithy phrases from photographers category, we have Batut’s contribution:

The secret of happiness consists in living the life without expecting anything from the people that surround us, but in the same time it is necessary to live it like if the others are expecting everything from us.

Batut was, interestingly enough, another early experimenter with superposition of photographs (also a compulsion of mine). Below left is the composite image of 50 inhabitants of Labrugière, from the Batut museum (questionable title on relevant page: “Arthur Batut even took photos of people who did not exist!”). Below right is the women of Vich, Spain.

The Batut family (Arthur, his wife, mother-in-law, and 2 sons):

… are experienced by 1 in 10 people, according to the BBC.

… can be recreated in the other 9 of us through the use of virtual reality goggles and a photographic visual illusion of the subject’s body.

Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind.

(Interesting overlap here with David Maisel’s phrasing, also concerning the disruption of conventions of vision.)

I’ll be particularly impressed when the virtual bodies can do the photographing.

Above photo is used as initial illustration in the BBC article, for reasons entirely unclear to me. I suppose a clearly legible action shot of someone having such an experience might fit into the category of Hard to Capture Photographically; replacement with loin-cloth-clad man in dramatic shaft of light doesn’t really do it for me either.

How apt that today’s New York Times read my currently aerial-photography-obsessed mind with this today. Moreover, the show is here in Maine. Discussed are Margot Balboni’s Geoscape images - 20 years of photographing human-land interactions from a hovering helicopter.

Though mis-labeled in the online NYTimes caption, above image is O (Oasis) - Elk City, OK. 26 images from A(rt) to Z(ig Zag), via (X)anadu and (D)igestors. Not sure how I feel about the alphabet trope.

Which leads me even higher - from helicopter to plane - to what I intended to write about in any case: the work of David Maisel. I would footnote his work with the words Sublime Turmoil - both concepts which emerge in Geoff Manaugh’s in-depth interview with Maisel here - within which I also idly discover that he spent an isolated year in Maine… and the following quotes (healthy attitudes to photography all, in my book):

For the most part, I’m interested in landscape images not merely for what they look like, but for what they make us feel, and for what they might represent metaphorically. I’ve also wanted my pictures to take the viewer to places and sites they’ve never seen before, with a resulting sense of alienation or displacement. I’m less interested in being warm and fuzzy than in being harsh and cruel!

The aerial view has certainly become, in our lifetimes, increasingly normative. The impulse is to assume that we understand or know something concrete about a place because we’ve seen a photograph of it, whether aerial or otherwise. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that theory; information can be just that, dumb and inert: it needs tools of interpretation and discernment and judgment in order to have meaning. “Definitive meaning,” as such, is a slippery slope indeed. In fact, the slope is steeper and more treacherous now as the sheer quantity of information (from Google Earth, TerraServer, etc.) grows.

I should add that I don’t think of my work as aerial photography, or of as myself as an aerial photographer per se; it is simply a tool that I use in order to make the pictures that I want to make.

David Maisel, from Terminal Mirage. They make me feel all warm and fuzzy, despite intention.

Again flipping through an unpleasantly moldy copy of The Best of Popular Photography… from November 1951, H.M. Kinzer writes on Nadar: “he succeeded in photographing the Arc de Triomphe for the first time as the birds saw it.” Of course, in the days of cumbersome wet collodion plates, it would have probably been unimaginable to predict that later miniaturization of photographic paraphernalia would one day allow birds to literally photograph it themselves. (Full disclosure - try as I might (a good 30 seconds of Google Images delving), I could not find an actual pigeon-facilitated photograph of the Arc de Triomphe itself.* But the point stands.)

The article rhapsodizes at length on Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon until the name change; self-portrait above, and in caricature, below**) and his A-list portraiture. Much more interesting is the flying darkroom part. To his naysayers/skeptics/those worried about his survival, this pithy reply: “Nothing is so easy as what was done yesterday; nothing is so difficult as what will be done tomorrow.” And difficult it was. Some technical details: “A big orange-and-black tent, impermeable to light, was suspended from the rigging above, and a smoky safelight was mounted inside. ‘It was warm inside,’ recalled Nadar, ‘but our collodion plates didn’t mind, submerged in their cool baths.’”

Much trial and many errors later, it wasn’t until a hydrogen-less balloon ride in the nude (”The cumbersome tent was left behind: he would do his processing later on the ground. This done, the balloon struggled to rise, bounded up once or twice, and settled sadly back to earth. Only a few more pounds would do the trick. Modesty was sacrificed to science–Nadar removed all his clothes and jettisoned them. Success! The balloon rose…”) that the unflappable experimenter would realize the chemical impediment that was the hydrogen itself (”‘Silver iodide and hydrogen sulfide,’ he reminded himself, ‘make a bad marriage which can bring forth no offspring.’”). None of Nadar’s hard-won aerial photographs seem to have survived in the intervening years, sadly; image below is in fact Boston, not Paris, on October 13, 1860, photographed by James Wallace Black from a captive balloon.

*I could not even find, to my surprise, a picture of a pigeon at the Arc de Triomphe.

**1862, Honoré Daunier. “Nadar elevating photography to the height of art.” Caricature + Irony.

Pigeons, after all, do run Google (from whom: “…pigeons are surprisingly adept at making instant judgments when confronted with difficult choices.”).

Never was I more intimate with city pigeons (Columba livia) than in our apartment in Mumbai. Photographic obsession, albeit not on the level afforded to the equally ubiquitous Indian Crow, was instinctive. A few highlights from those pigeony days:

NB: Above accidental egg incubation on kitchen shelf is what happens when you go away for a weekend and leave your window cracked open. A reminder of above quote: “…pigeons are surprisingly adept at making instant judgments when confronted with difficult choices.” (Counterexample in unfortunate dead pigeon, also above - who, incidentally, hailed from Italy, not India.)

All of this pigeon talk led me, naturally, to the use of pigeons in aerial photography, as opposed to (mere!) transport of film. Google Earth satellite technology, beware! Very perfunctory Google research seems to indicate that the Bavarian Pigeon Corps took initiatives in this direction as early as 1903. Pigeons are apparently harder to shoot down than balloons and kites, which had already been employed for decades in the pursuit of aerial photography reconnaissance. The miniature pigeon-strapped cameras weighed 2.5 ounces and, thanks to attached timers, took photographs every 30 seconds. Below images gleaned from image-googling, and original sources unclear. Note the wingtips in top image.

Although airplane development quickly rendered pigeon-o-graphs obsolete, it should come as no small surprise that I stumbled across Amos Latteier, an artist/pigeon raiser who is continuing to push the pigeon-photography link. You can download a PDF summary of his experiments from his site - below left is a sample pigeon-in-flight image, and below right shows the camera upon return from a voyage. Among the Next Steps listed: “More Pigeon Training” and “Shorter Trips.”

Just read a brief article from February 1938’s Popular Photography, entitled “Giving Wings to News Pictures,” by Frank J. Hughes, on how carrier pigeons were used to carry both photos and news to newspapers in a pre-bits-and-bytes era. The New York Evening Journal had a pigeon loft on their roof and their photography department purchased “sixty pedigreed birds, all bred from carrier pigeons with a World War record.” (Such pigeons as, possibly, the famous Cher Ami). The article continues: “It is interesting to learn how the pigeons make their landings at the newspaper office. When they arrive at the loft, an automatic switch lights a large electric bulb and sounds a buzzer in the editorial room. It is only ten minutes from the time the pigeon lands until the story is ready to set in type.” Brilliant.

From today’s NYTimes, an article on Nina Berman’s portraits of wounded Iraq war veterans.

“In what may be the most intensively photographed war in history, the visual documentation has been selective.”

Real photograph, or computer graphic simulation? Can you recognize the difference?