IP

The Glacier River by Tom Hegen (drone photo)

We build the boxes we live in, write on square pieces of paper, and invented the four-cornered frame. This frame is what separates us from nature itself... 

Frames are a way of defining focus, of establishing its limits. A painting does not spread to the periphery, it occupies a space within four corners (rarely a circle). Why this is, has much to do with history. Our ancestors painted on cave walls without regard for formal rules of display. The Greeks painted on everything, from bowls to amphorae to buildings. But sometime thereafter, the quadrate became the most convenient means of representation, almost as though the painter already knew that photography would necessarily use the same form, the capture form of a rectangle. Early on, papyrus, parchment and eventually paper were quadrate, the most efficient way to transcribe language.

Photography introduced the frame to real life, taking it out of the museums and churches, and putting it on our tables, our walls, and in our books and photo albums. Aesthetic or not, the image within the frame came to define a place, a moment, a person, the content the result of a conscious choice.

Until now, the contemplation of natural beauty has always been horizontal—nature seen from eye level. It’s one of the reasons people flock to high places—mountain tops, skyscrapers—not just to see more, but to shift the angle of our horizontal gaze just enough to engender the ‘aha’ moment. What we really want are wings. But unlike Daedalus and Icarus, it’s escapism we’re after, not escape.

In ancient times, it took a quantum leap of the imagination to infer the visual information drones would eventually deliver. It began with cartography, the extreme view from above, one of man’s oldest pictorial urges to satisfy an everlasting curiosity about the world we occupy. Mapmaking was undertaken by visionaries in all cultures, on all continents, the oldest known map dating back 25,000 years. Maps derived from a combination of knowledge and imagination, with a fair measure of extrapolating thrown in until we knew more.

If drone photography is a radical new aesthetic, it is not only because of its endless possibilities, but because its new point of view represents the ultimate fulfilment of our oldest dream, to fly like a bird and look down.

(by Brooks Riley)

View of Vienna from a Balloon by Otto Wagner, 1899