Castleberry, May.Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narra-
tives of the Desert West. New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1996.
Di Grappa, Carol, ed.Landscape Theory. Lustrum Press,
New York, 1980.
Fillin-yeh, Susan and Leo Rubinfien.Sunlight, Solitude,
Democracy, Home...Photographs by Robert Adams. Seat-
tle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002.
Phillips, Sandra S.Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the
Developing West, 1849 to the Present. San Francisco,
CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Ratcliff, Carter.Route 66 Revisited: The New Landscape
Photography. Art in America, January/February, 1976.
Weinberg, Adam D.Reinventing the West: The Photographs
of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. Andover, MA: Addi-
son Gallery of American Art, 2001.AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
The technology of aerial photography stems from
nineteenth century devices—the photographic cam-
era and air travel—but it was conceived in social
and technological forces that began at the dawn of
Western civilization. It is thus central to the devel-
opment of photography, even though it is rarely
treated as a subject of commentary.
Aerial photographs offer a geometrically de-
termined view of objects within a given area. The
origins of this view lie in the third millennium BCE,
when Sumerian priests ruled city-states through
estate management and a religion based on sky
gods. As conceived at the time, urban deities sur-
veyed their domains from the sky, conveying legiti-
macy onto the priests, who realized the aerial view
with surveying. Since then surveying has been
essential to governance, and from it has come geo-
metry and a cascade of geometric disciplines, nota-
bly perspectival drawing and classical optics, that
led to the development of photography.
The uses of aerial surveys have changed little
since the days of Sumer. Every day the infrastruc-
ture and citizens of advanced nations are photo-
graphed dozens of times by a vast network of
cameras based on satellites, aircraft, buildings and
poles. These cameras are creating real-time maps of
their subjects at scales ranging from the intimate to
the global, and, as the first survey maps of Sumer,
these automated mapmakers aid in governance of
society and the control of resources.
The relation between photographs and maps
may not be immediately obvious because most
photographs are vertically stratified, that is they
reveal the horizontal detail of their subject. How-
ever, when the picture plane of a camera is held
parallel to the surface of the earth, as in aerial
photography, the inherently map-like nature of
photography is intuitively obvious. Photographs
and maps both reveal the spatial aspects of the
environment, that is, the arrangement of objects
on a plane in relation to one another. In both aerial
photography and cartography, the vantage can
offer some level of vertical stratification, the so-
called chorographic view, or it can represent ob-
jects in their proper geometric form. Our visual
intuition on the relationship between maps and
cameras is backed by the historical development
of the camera and the techniques of perspectival
drawing that it automated.
Aerial photography began in the mid-1800s,
some thirty years after the advent of photography.
In 1858 the pioneering Parisian Nadar took a cam-
era on a series of balloon ascents, and in 1864 he
published a book about the experience,Les Mem-
oires du Gea ́nt. On the other side of the Atlantic, J.
W. Black and Sam King ascended 1,200 feet in a
balloon to take a photograph of Boston in 1860. It
was war, however, that stimulated the development
of aerial photography. Nadar refused his services
to Napoleon III in 1859, but commanded the Paris
balloon corps during the siege of the early 1870s.
By then the American Civil War had established a
number of wartime precedents. As the war broke
out in 1861 a civilian balloonist inadvertently flew
over Confederate states. His report convinced the
Union government to support the creation of the
U.S. Balloon Corps, which operated until 1863.
During that time photographers stationed in teth-
ered balloons created large-scale maps of battle-
fields that were overlaid with grids to determine
troop movements.
In the twentieth century, the prospects of aerial
photography improved as did aircraft, cameras,
and telemetry. Balloon reconnaissance continuedADAMS, ROBERT