The Instrumental Image, which includes more than 50 works from the Benton’s collection as well as loans from other institutional and private collections, charts the varied purposes aerial photography has served since its inception. Dating to the late nineteenth century, aerial photographs—initially called “bird’s-eye views”—have been taken from rooftops and hilltops, with balloons or kites, and by way of carrier pigeons outfitted with cameras. Due to these origins, aerial perspectives have tended to be interpreted as a non-human or technological way of seeing. During World War I, aerial photography—now taken from planes—became further distanced from “human” perspectives and became identified as an instrument of war, when photographs taken at vertical or oblique angles from various elevations have been used to predict the movement of troops, identify targets, and document bombing campaigns.
The title of this exhibition comes from “The Instrumental Image,” a landmark essay written in 1975 by the critic and conceptual photographer Allan Sekula. Writing about the intensification of aerial photography for the purposes of information gathering in World War I—in particular, the images taken by the American Expeditionary Forces photographic unit commanded by none other than pictorialist photographer Edward Steichen—Sekula asked what could be made of the “nearly mute picture[s]” that appeared as if abstract landscapes or cityscapes: “Are they records, tools, artworks, decorations, commodities, relics?” Sekula warned that our tendency to aestheticize views from the air risked minimizing the human and environmental costs of an aerial assault, fearing that “it might be possible to have one’s war and enjoy it too.”
While certainly intertwined with war and colonialism, however, aerial photography has produced its alternative histories, also presented in the exhibition. In the United States, photographer Roy DeCarava captured intimate scenes from Harlem recorded from above in the 1950s. By mid-century, aerial photographs had become instruments in multiple disciplines, such as geology and climate science. William Garnett, for example, was one of the first landscape photographers to specialize in aerial photography. He was commissioned in the mid-1950s to photograph the first privately developed real estate project to be incorporated as a city, Lakewood, CA. The resulting photographic series—included in part in The Instrumental Image— was simultaneously cherished by Lakewood’s developers and interpreted by environmentalists (Garnett included) as a documentation of disaster.
The Instrumental Image: Aerial Photography as Problem and Possibility brings together such case studies in “instrumental” aerial photography alongside artists’ creative questions about what it means to take a photograph from the air. From wire photographs (images transmitted via electrical impulses) to contemporary art or activist works in multiple photographic media by artists who have challenged the dominant use of aerial photography as an instrument of surveillance and state violence, the exhibition ultimately seeks to uncover the problems and possibilities inherent in the very notion of an aerial photograph.
