Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky's photographs are large and busy, he likes to portray modern human activity, capitalism and consumerism. He digitally manipulates and merges the multiple positioned shots into ordered/repetative images of huge scale. The photographs are impersonal and full of atmosphere. The photographs are all taken from a high vantage point which can make them look and feel disturbing "someone is watching".
Camera position is the important element of his work. Usually Gursky places his camera up high or as far away as possible, on cranes, or even on helicopters. (Saltz: 2007).

Marilyn Bridges

Marilyn Bridges a photographer, pilot and explorer. Her work has scientific value, but it is also driven by her personal vision and the exhilaration of flight. It highlights the similarity between mark-makers of long ago and the builders of modern cities. Many of the earliest earth works she photographed are impossible to see compleately from the ground. By legend, they were not built to be seen by the makers but by their gods.

Bridges said "I felt as though I was in the presence of a great force, a force that provided unity, that challenged the narrow perspectives of our lives by requiring us to step back enough to view the whole." (Hartshorn: 2011)

Seeing from above is not the same as seeing from the ground. It is not just a matter of up and down. It takes quite some time to be able to condense information from such a large scale of vision. Seeing from a bird's perspective with human eyes initially can be confusing--one gets lost in the sweep of imagery and feels restricted by the apparent flatness of everything (Bridges: 2011)

William Garnett

I was discharged and heard you could hitchhike on the transport taking GIs home. The airplane was full, but the captain let me sit in the navigator's seat so I had a command view. I was amazed at the variety and beauty of these United States. I had never seen anything like that--in a book, in school, or since then. So I changed my career.

--William Garnet. (Napa: 2006)

William Garnett's aerial photographs defies the stereotype of aerial photography as purely scientific and free from artistry. Garett's work resembles abstract expressionist paintings. As landscapes, they do not have the conventional horizon line. His images all reveal patterns that are not seen from the ground. (Fear: 2006) Garnett became the first aerial photographer to earn the prestigious Guggenheim Award. (Napa: 2006)

Garnett takes aerial photographs that show the beauty of the land when seen from above.His pictures of sand dewns look like abstract pictures, the photos of housing development sights look like patterns, everything is flattened out and looks facinating.

Base Jumping - sport

The Burj Dubthe the tallest building in the world has been the scene for a world record BASE jump. A British man made a successful jump, while his friend a Frenchman, was caught before he could jump. They were both arrested and held in Dubai.

World Record BASE Jump. (2008). [online] Available at: http://current.com/sports/89546563_world-record-base-jump.htm. Accessed on 25-3-2011. [Documentory]


Base jumper Dan Witchall asked how he feels before a jump he says ‘I think I might die, every time’. The thrill of outwitting security systems, the risk of being caught climbing up a building onto a roof is almost as big a thrill as the jump. Since 1981, around 140 base jumpers have fallen to their death.
The latest episode of The Men Who Jump off Buildings can be watched on 4oD.

Donaldson. B. (2010). Independentt. The Men Who Jump Off Buildings – Base Jumping [online] Available at: http://www.list.co.uk/article/27340-the-men-who-jump-off-buildings-base-jumping/ [accessed on 24-3-2011].

Everyone dies, don't they – but not everyone lives," said Dan, the subject of Alastair Cook's film The Men Who Jump Off Buildings.

Sutcliffe. T. (2010) The Men Who jump Off Buildings. Channel 4./The Great Outdoors BBC4. Independent. [online] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-tv-the-men-who-jump-off-buildingschannel-4br-the-great-outdoors-bbc4-2037779.html (accessed on 24-3-2011)

Airborne camera

When man was at last able to ascend into the air, he marvelled at the sight of the land stretched endlessly below him. The “Birds eye view” came into being the moment perspective was a concern of western man, and Columbus sailed towards the ever distant vanishing point.

Frenchman Aurther Batut was a pioneer in this kite or (Aerial) photography. He built a kite which he modified to carry a camera and he used a home made box camera with a guillotine shutter to take pictures with. In 1851 Batut discovered that detailed acurate maps and ground plans could be made by taking two or more aerial photos and reversing the rules of perspective.

The German army experimented with rocket photography and in 1888 the magazine La Nature described the photo rocket. In 1891 a patent was issued to German Ludwig Rahnmann for a large calibre gun or rocket photographic system. A pigeon camera was also patented in Germany in 1903 this consisted of the pigeon having a harness fitted to him, this harness had a miniture camera attached to it.

Batut was inspired by Tissanders book on balloon photography although balloon photographs were rarely accepted as landscape.

Uses of aerial photographs include: - making accurate maps, finding disturbances in soil = archaeological sites, geography = untract terrain, civil engineering, city planning, forestry commission, traffic engineers and geologists, concervation work, as well as tax collection (land ownership). (Newhall: 1969)

Newhall. B. (1969). Airborne Camera. London: Focal Press Ltd.

Base Jumping

In 1975, Owen J. Quinn, a jobless man parachuted from the south tower of the World Trade Centre to publicise the plight of unemployment. Quinn got a job with the dock builders' union, working at the World Trade Centre and on July 22, he disguised himself as a construction worker, hid his parachute in a duffel bag and made his way up the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. He claims to have been inspired after seeing a modle of the WTC. Quinn had long ago had his first taste of parachuting and absolutely loved it and wanted to die doing it. Quinn wore a blue football jersey with the biblical verse, a19:26: "But Jesus beheld them and said unto them, with men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible". When he landed he was arrested. He was booked and charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, and reckless endangerment. (Base Jumping: 2011)

In 1976 Rick Sylvester skied off Canada's Mount Asgard for the ski chase sequence of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, giving the wider world its first look at BASE jumping.

Base Jumping.(2011). [online]. Jumping Off A Cliff, AVAILABLE at: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping [ACCESSED ON 24-3-2011]

Franz Reichelt

(1879 – February 4, 1912)
An Austrian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, he is remembered for his accidental death by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design. Despite attempts by friends and spectators to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he crashed into the ground at the foot of the tower. The next day, newspapers were full of the story.

Franz Reichelt said "I want to try the experiment myself and without trickery, as I intend to prove the worth of my invention". (Je veux tenter l’expérience moi-même et sans chiqué [sic], car je tiens à bien prouver la valeur de mon invention.)

Wikipidia. [online]Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt (Accessed on 24-3-2011).

flying high

This is my one and only time of gliding like a bird.
The feeling I had when doing this was terrific, it gave me a great sense of freedom.
What was amazing was how safe I felt.
I was so excited as I looked down at the people below on the beach, the view was so different from up here, I could see forever.

Notes On Scott Haefner.

Kite photography, invented in the 1870s—flourished until the 1920s, when airplane photography took over. In France, pioneering photographers created aerial panoramas.

George Lawrence sent a camera skyward to record the destruction from the 1906 San Francisco quake.

Kite photography was reborn in the 1980s. Today it’s booming, with several hundred practitioners worldwide and as many Web sites. Haefner knows half a dozen fellow enthusiasts.

It is virtual reality and psychedelia all in one, as the world spins about with ever-changing distortions.

Haefner creates bubble panoramas, using a fish-eye lens to take one shot looking straight up and another shot from the kite straight down, then stitching them together using several software programs and a process developed by French engineer and Lego master Philippe Hurbain.

“...it is virtual reality in the sense that you’re able to get inside this image and rotate it around,” Haefner says. “You’re in control. It’s almost like you’re on this ride where you’re suspended in the air and you can turn and look in any direction you want.”

A remote control box the size of a lunch box lets him aim and shoot.

Weinstein, D . 2003. On Scott Haefner: San Francisco Chronicle [online] July 11 [Available at]

http://scotthaefner.com/publications/chronicle/’: [accessed on 28^th January 2011 at 23 30.]

Olivio Barbieri

In the mid-1980s, Olivo Barbieri travelled to Brittainy, in the north of France, to photograph some of Europe’s oldest manmade structures; towering stones that were shaped and placed on end, these enormous stones stand three to six meters high. It takes only imagination to see these megaliths as the ancestors of the soaring buildings of today. He started out using classical photography and to attempt to describe the world objectively. Barbieri`s expressive approach to night time colour photography brought unexpected life to the scenes. His photographs intensify the unreality that is often encountered in the global cities of the present day. He turned two photographic "mistakes" into signature expressive devices. In the early 1990’s he exploited the technical peculiarity that photographic film "sees" the color temperature of artificial light in ways that do not correspond to human vision. In the late 1990s, he began to experiment with a special tilt-shift lens. Photographs of actual city scenes look like images of miniaturized architectural models. Today there are city’s that are like models.

Phillips,C. (2006) Unreal Cities. [online] Available at: http://artaction.org/proposition/catalogue/detail_cat.php?codeoeuvre=S1377&lang=en&qui=prod&oeuvre=S1377>[Accessed on 20^th January 2011: 14:40]

summary

Trying to obtain this view inspired some ingenious inventions, such as sending cameras up into the sky attached to free balloons, kites and even attaching them to pigeons. Some inventions sound pretty dangerous like using large calibre guns or rocket photographic systems. Arthur Batut a Frenchman was a pioneer of Arial photography; he made a kite that could carry his home made camera on which he had invented a shutter that he could operate from the ground. (Newhall: 1969). There was also a French taylor called Franz Reichelt, who made himself a wearable parachute. He unfortunately killed himself by jumping from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower on February 4^th 1912. When testing the suit, he said “I want to try the experiment myself and without trickery, as I intend to prove the worth of my invention”. (Je veux tenter l’expérience moi-même et sans chiqué [sic], car je tiens à bien prouver la valeur de mon invention.) (Franz Reichelt) (Wikipedia 2011).

Kite photography was the most used way of obtaining a ‘bird’s eye view’ (even though these views were seldom accepted as a landscape) from the 1870’s until the 1920’s when aeroplanes became more widely used for aerial photography. However, kite photography came back into fashion in the 1980’s, thanks to new high-performance kites, and is practiced today by an increasing number of photographers. Most kite photographers do it for fun. A few, including earth scientists and geologists, incorporate it into their studies. Scott Haefner, an environmental scientist does both. He attaches the camera to the line of the kite, and has a remote control box which lets him aim and shoot the camera. Haefner says. “You have got to be inventive and be willing to spend the time building the rig.” (Weinstein: 2003)

The bird’s eye view is so spectacular there is nothing that people will not do to acquire the feeling of freedom and exhilaration that it gives. Some people even try to make them selves fly like kites, by doing such activities as power gliding, hand gliding and the most recent and the most dangerous sport of all, base jumping. The base jumper launches himself from the highest building or cliffs he can find, and with the aid of a parachute glides to the ground. I myself tried power gliding and found it the most exhilarating thing I have ever done, the view below was just incredible and I felt very safe which was surprising as I am usually very nervous of heights.

Photographers such as Marilyn Bridges and Scott Haefner both have a scientific basis to take aerial photographs. But this is not the only motivation for them. Bridges likes the thrill of flying and Haefner does it for pure fun. Whereas photographic artists Olivo Barbieri, Andreas Gursky and William Garnet, take aerial photographs for there artistic practise and sheer pleasure of obtaining the photograph they will only acquire from the air.