jeudi 17 février 2005

Aerial Photos... A Different View of the Ordinary Although I've always been fascinated by aerial photographs of natural and man-made features on the earth's surface, I've never had the nerve to be an aerial photographer... I prefer to keep both feet on the ground and look at, admire with extra appreciation even, the work of others who fear not the pull of nature... upwards gently or hopefully not downwards violently. During one overlong period of my career in commercial TV I was flying to work in the morning and flying back for dinner in the evening... it being cheaper to take the plane than pay for meals and an hotel. I realise this is commonplace nowadays - but I'm talking about the late 60s when planes had propellors! However, on one return trip to Belfast about twenty years ago I drove around the spiral ramp to the airport car-park, twice around it, and back down again to return home... having made the decision to never fly again. When I make a decision like that I keep to it... I'm suspicious to a point - I know the rope will snap when it's my turn to make the traverse across the rock face... and I've never taken a ride on a ferris wheel because of the fear of being in that one loose chair that gets flipped over backwards by a freak gust of wind (probably can't happen because of the design and safety locks, etc... but the day I take a ride will be the day the day those safety features somehow break). So I've spent many occasions "grounded" as others have taken to the air... suspended beneath hang-gliders, leaning out of wickerwork baskets beneath hot-air balloons and sat half out of the door with feet on the landing skids of helicopters... and despite many offers of similar thrills and opportunities... oh no... it's definitely not for me! I'll continue to look at aerial photos in books in the comfort of my warm study. Of the photographers who've made a name for themselves airborne I particularly like the work of Marilyn Bridges whose black-and-white aerial images of the same Wiltshire White Horses I've photographed many times reveal a completely different picture... in fact a completely different landscape. From high above the ground every weather-sculpted feature can be picked out by the light of the low sun... from natural contours surrounding hillsides to the straighter traces of roads, fences, animal tracks... and spacemen? The spacemen theory was mooted by Erich von Daniken in his book "Chariots of the Gods" when he described the implausibility of the Nazca lines in Peru having been made by human hand... such was their enormous scale, distance and inclination to other objects. However, Alan Alford, author of "Mysteries of the World" has Nazca theories of his own which are more down to earth. One thing is evident though... the abstract nature of terra firma from elevated positions when photographed in black-and-white. For me, colour lends too much reality to scenes - not that it detracts from the wonderful angles seen through the lenses of photographers such as Frenchman Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose huge book "The Earth from the Air" has sold over two million examples (and also been produced in "braille" relief for non-sighted people to enjoy), or the similar abstract views made some decades ago by balloon-borne Swiss photographer Georg Gerster and published as "Flights of Discovery - the Earth from Above," nor by Baron Wolman and his splendid aerial views of California from the Air: The Golden Coast... but I feel my monochrome image above revealing the hilltop patterns of a farmer's ploughed furrows criss-crossed probably by his tractor en route to another field... and the dark shadow of the deep lake (at the foot of the escarpment bottom-right) sun glinting on the eddies against it's right-hand shore line. But look closer... there are no white dots of sheep to be seen in this landscape... perhaps only insects... because my "aerial landscape" is a much smaller and closer piece of nature showing the hand of man... the bizarre pattern of lines made by his repeated attempts with a chain-saw to cut through the girth of a once majestic tree. 9:24:23 PM    comment []