Essay: Buckham, Moberg, MacDonald, Three Aerial Photographs

A city at once in mist, smog and sunlight, waters winding through snow and past ancient pine trees, twenty-two sheep in a fort in the ocean, these are the gifts of aerial vision to be found today in Edinburgh’s galleries. It is festival time and there are three significant photography exhibitions running concurrently. Planes Trains and Automobiles at the National Portrait Gallery, In Focus at City Art Centre and The Days Never Seem the Same at Stills. Each of these exhibitions features at least one aerial photograph of note: Aerial View of Edinburgh (circa. 1920) by Alfred G. Buckham, Braided river and ancient pines, Glen Feshie, Cairngorms, (1988) by Patricia MacDonald and Sheep Fort, Rusk Holm (circa. 1978) by Gunnie Moberg. All three photographs can be easily found online, but in the space of an afternoon and within a short walking distance all three can be viewed first hand. This brief essay is an encouragement to walk that walk and to look carefully whilst considering the specific properties of aerial photography. 

An Aerial View of Edinburgh is a birdseye view of the city with it’s famous castle clearly lit in the foreground, Arthur’s seat is cloaked in mist in the background with Auld Reekie spreading out from beneath the smog between the two. The top half of the picture is dominated by spectacular clouds with an RAF bi-plane added in to provide scale and to reflect back on the means by which the photograph itself was made. The sepia toned print is one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular photographs. This is partly because it pictures so dramatically the city where it resides, but also because of its innovative quality and the colourful biography of its maker. Buckham was a pioneer of aerial photography, one of the first to apply the technology and methods developed as a military reconnaissance photographer during World War I to commercial and aesthetic purposes. He photographed often in Scotland but also much further afield in South America.

MacDonald’s photograph also explains itself through its title. This colour photograph was made looking directly down at the earth. Depth of field, deployed so effectively by Buckham, is absent here, the picture flattened out. Dark brown ribbons of mountain water criss-cross as they gently fall through a snow-covered stretch of Glen Feshie. A handful of ancient pine trees both living and dead, remnants of the great Caledonian Forest, are scattered along the waters edge. Above the valley bottom, the snow has melted revealing grey scree and pale green grass. The shadows cast by the standing trees are not long. The season could be autumn or spring. This photograph is part of MacDonald’s Shadow of Heaven series, a seminal collection of photographs of Scotland from Above.

In her 1978 black and white photograph of a stone built refuge for sheep, (she made another later, from a higher viewpoint, and in colour), Gunnie Moberg looks down obliquely at this ‘fort’ made of hundreds of flat sandstones slotted into place vertically, one on top of the other, until a platform has been raised proud of the encircling tidal waters. This photograph also appears in a book, Orkney, Pictures & Poems, alongside George Mackay Brown’s poem Rusk Holm, in which he compares this “fort in the ocean” to Noah’s ark. The poem ends with the “Orkney storm-gathered ewes” stumbling “out of their stone ark one by one, to the salted grass”. The immediate surrounds of the fort appear to be giant slabs of flagstone that can be seen just below the surface of the swirling white waters. In the book of Genesis Noah sends out a dove and it returns to him with an olive leaf in her beak thus confirming that the waters of the Great Flood are subsiding. In the oldest version of the story, recounted several centuries earlier in The Epic of Gilgamesh, things play out slightly differently:

            “I brought out a raven, I let it loose:

              off went the raven, it saw the waters receding,

finding food, bowing and bobbing, it did not come back to me.”

Recent technological developments mean that aerial photography will become more not less of a feature of our future visual culture. Three aerial photographs can be seen today in the galleries of Edinburgh. They offer an opportunity for close looking and for thinking about how and why they were made and how they work visually. Each one of them is full of information that could not be gleaned from a ground level perspective. Buckley’s photograph shows us a city and its topography all at once. Our focus is on what we see within the picture frame: architectural sprawl, landscaped gardens, hills born of volcanic activity millions of years ago. The power of this photograph is the way it reveals the relationship between these component parts of the city. Through her aerial photography Patricia MacDonald has subtly and poetically drawn attention to environmental issues. The picture of Glen Feshie suggests a landscape that has been denuded of its once great forest due to manmade activity over centuries. Gunnie Moberg’s fort in the ocean speaks of the constant struggle of humans to survive in remote places exposed to the elements. The photograph would be mundane without the aerial perspective and the ability to see inside the fort the small flock of sheep, huddled together in their refuge waiting out the rising and falling of the tide. The fort in the ocean is gone now, washed away over time. No doubt ravens and seabirds still fly overhead. 

Seeing from above brings special knowledge, it reveals an integrated picture not accessible from ground level. Aerial perspective has fascinated humans since before we sent out ravens to see on our behalf, but aerial photography brought this fascination to new levels and soon found practical application. Early practitioners used kites and balloons, first to photograph cities and then almost inevitably, theatres of war. The use of aerial photography by military personnel, coupled with developments in heavier than air flight, (aeroplanes, rockets, satellites, drones), has pushed this way of seeing to a central position in global culture. Traditionally, apart from the military, it has always been specialists who have worked with aerial photography: artists, anthropologists, urban planners and archaeologists. In the 1960s Henri Lefebvre characterised aerial photography as a tool of state power. Now the proliferation of small drone technology and virtually free online access to satellite imagery have democratised aerial vision somewhat. This democratisation does not remove the risk of its abuse. Aerial images are often difficult to read. They come with physical distance built in but their abstract nature also encourages an intellectual distance that can lead to emotional detachment from the subject of the photograph. 

The technology and uses of aerial photography are still evolving rapidly, sometimes in sinister directions. The more we educate ourselves in this way of seeing the better able we will be to discern the useful from the misleading. In Norse mythology, the high god Odin had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, their names meaning “thought” and “memory”. Consider this when walking across the centre of Edinburgh to look closely and carefully at these three aerial photographs.