Burtynsky, H-Two-Oh

Recently, The Economist, ran this two part video interview with Edward Burtynsky on his newly published project Water.

How Not to Run a Photo Contest

 The cloud cover over Mount Fuji.

I stumbled across this story at the BBC reporting on  a contest to pick the best satellite image of 2012.The image I've lifted above did not win. The prize went to an image of Burning Man. Any chance that the venue for the contest - Facebook - might have biased the sort of participants who 'voted'? Any chance that the typical Facebook user would be familiar with Burning Man but be clueless as to where Mt. Fuji is located? Fuji? Isn't that a film company?

A Clearly Divided CIty

I am not sure why, but I have not seen this image before this evening. Generally I think of New York as little more than an advertising circular much like the ones that appear unsolicited in our rural mail box. But I have to say that this cover image - taken from a helicopter at 5000 feet the night after the recent storm - by Iwan Baan is pretty remarkable. Here are some reflections from the photographer:

“It was the only way to show that New York was two cities, almost . . . One was almost like a third world country where everything was becoming scarce. Everything was complicated. And then another was a completely vibrant, alive New York.

What really struck me, if you look at the image on the left, you see the Goldman Sachs building and new World Trade Center. These two buildings are brightly lit. And then the rest of New York looks literally kind of powerless. In a way, it shows also what’s wrong with the country in this moment.”

 And, of course, Baan's image only captures Manhattan, leaving out the  darkness and devastation in the other boroughs.;

Picturing the Prison-Industrial Complex

I simply could not resist piling on here. This screen shot from a project by Josh Begley (via the inimitable Pete Brook) is a google-esque condensation of "the geography of incarceration" in the United States. Aerial shots of the nearly 5,000 branches of our prison-industrial complex.

AI ~ Science for Human Rights: Human Rights Monitoring for the 21st Century.

Beirut City, Lebanon, After (l) and Before (r)
Bombing by Israeli Forces (2006).

I suspect Colin Powell's duplicity and dissembling about WMD in Iraq will have made many skeptical about the uses of aerial (actually satellite) photography to document phenomena on the ground. But one should not identify a technology with any particular one its uses. I've noted some of the uses of aerial imagery here before. Skeptics might follow this link for a demonstration of how Amnesty International is using aerial photography as an aid to visualizing the consequences of violent conflict. Amnesty is not alone in this enterprise; you can find interesting discussions of the broader intersection of human rights work and aerial imaging technology here and here too. (Thanks for the idea Will Moore!)

J. Henry Fair ~ The Difference Venue Makes

Crime and Punishment, 2010 (Oil from BP Deepwater Horizon spill
on the Gulf of Mexico.) Photograph © J. Henry Fair.

Roberta Smith published this smart review in The New York Times the other day of work by J. Henry Fair. I especially appreciate the contrast she draws between the works shown in the gallery and those that appear in Fair's forthcoming book.* Smith looked closely and did her job well. Fair is clearly a remarkable photographer and his work seems interesting. It fits into an emerging "genre" of work relying on aerial views to create forceful views of environmental mayhem. (I've posted here several time before about photographers working on similar projects.) But the selectivity that Smith notes is telling.
__________
* J. Henry Fair. 2011. The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis. New York: powerHouse Books.

Oil from the Air

Oil Spill #10, June 24, 2010. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Oil Spill #13, Mississippi Delta, June 24, 2010.
Photograph © Edward Burtynsky.

Best Shots (88) ~ Yann Arthus-Bertrand

(115) Yann Arthus-Bertrand ~ Athabasca Oil Sands,
Alberta, Canada (23 September 2009).

Best Shots (39) ~ Edward Burtynsky

(65) Edward Burtynsky ~ Tailing Pond (oil), Northern Alberta ~
(21 August '08).

Before & After

Higley Hot Dogs, 2005 © Andrew Phelps

From the series Oblivion (2004-2006) © David Maisel

At lensculture there are items on projects by Andrew Phelps and David Maisel that form a nice (I presume intended) complement. Phelps offers "The Last Days of Higley" a photo essay on the small Arizona town where his grandparents' had lived as it is swallowed up by urban sprawl (Phoenix). Maisel offers "Oblivion: Los Angeles from the Air" which is just what the title portends. Both projects are provocative - a sort of Before & After on seemingly irresistible 'advance' of urbanization. That said, while we may lament both the loss of before and the arrival of after, it seems important to me not to romanticize the former nor demonize the latter.

La Terre vue du Ciel (Earth from Above)

Find Captions: [1] [2]

Here are just two of the astonishing aerial photographs of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. You can find this brief essay on his work in The Guardian.

Truthful Images (2)

Also in The New York Times yesterday (20 August 2006) was a story that is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. It appeared in the Real Estate section and is entitled "Finding Tax Revenue Through Aerial Imaging" by-line to Fred Bernstein. The story discusses how local tax assessors rely on aerial photography to inventory property and to respond to owner appeals of assessments. Here is how the story begins:

"Why Some Homeowners May Not Be Smiling for These Cameras

THERE are about 300,000 row houses in Philadelphia, which means there are about 300,000 row house owners in Philadelphia who would like to see their tax assessments lowered.

Some of them get in touch with the city’s Board of Revision of Taxes. A caller may say, "Our house is in the worst condition of any on the block," said Barry Mescolotto, the board’s assistant administrator. These days, Mr. Mescolotto has a good answer: "I’ll say, ‘I’m looking at a photo of your house, and it looks to be about the same as all the others.’ "

"That usually ends the conversation," Mr. Mescolotto said.

Until recently, assessors had to accept homeowners’ claims or visit the properties themselves. But in 2003, the city hired the Pictometry International Corporation, a company in Rochester, N.Y., to provide images of every building in the city.

Once a year, Pictometry flies a Cessna 172 over Philadelphia, taking thousands of black-and-white photographs. The low-altitude shots, unlike satellite images, show buildings at about a 40-degree angle. Pictometry’s computers organize the photos so they can be searched by address. Nearly 200 employees in Mr. Mescolotto’s office have the software on their computers.

Pictometry isn’t the only company offering aerial photos to assessors, but it has won adherents in more than 200 cities and counties, according to Dante Pennacchia, Pictometry’s chief marketing officer. Its competitors include an Israeli company, Ofek International, working with Aerial Cartographics of America, based in Orlando, Fla.

Mr. Mescolotto said that the Pictometry system, which costs Philadelphia about $100,000 a year, "probably paid for itself within about two weeks."


The Times story is illustrated with a large image showing Mr. Mescolotto sporting a broad grin as well as with this smaller image of the George Eastman House in Rochester (which as a not-for-profit is off the city tax rolls).

So, the two reasons I find this interesting are: (1) that Pictometry International is headquartered in Rochester and (2) that their product illustrates my own preoccupation with the various uses of photography. You can compare an earlier post about the uses of aerial images to display and discriminate among patterns of sprawl. While that use may seem "progressive", the use discussed here may seem more like surveillance in Foucault's sense. Then again, property owners are simply seeking to evade taxes that are required for the exercise of liberty as well as for the alleviation of inequality.

A Field Guide to Sprawl

I just picked up a little picture book A Field Guide to Sprawl (WW Norton, 2004) which is a collaborative work by author Dolores Hayden who teaches at hte Architecture School at Yale and aerial photographer Jim Wark. The book offers an "illustrated vocabulary of sprawl," a lexicon for envisioning and discussing the consequences of uncontrolled land use.In her introduction Hayden writes: "When people struggle to interpret their local landscapes aerial photographs reveal the scale of existing and new development. In an era when a truck stop can be larger than a traditional town, aerial images convey the vast spread of twenty-first- century development and can bring up-to-the- minute data on the progress of construction. Also, aerial photographs can be understood by people without technical training in a way zoning maps, zoning codes, satellite surveys, and traditional site plans cannot. If shot at altitutdes of 1,000 to 2,ooo feet, they can show building facades as well as site massing. Although they rarely include recognizable people, when aerial images are shot at oblique angles and at relatively low altitutdes, showing land and buildings together, they entwine natural and constructed elements. Low-level, oblique-angle pictures can establish a complete visual inventory of a town because they can show inaccessible places such as wetlands or steep terrain, and reveal hidden sites such a dumps or gated communities."

Here are a couple of examples of images from the book that illustate the difficulty of envisioning "hidden sites" of the sort Hayden mentions:


Tire Recycling Dump. Midway, Colorado, CO, United States. (11/5/1997) © Jim Wark.


Golf Condos. Palm Desert, California, CA United States (3/10/2002) © Jim Wark.

On the highly questionable economic consequences of sprawl I recommend: Robert W. Burchell, Anthony Downs, and Sahan Mukherji, Sprawl Costs (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2005) as a terrific companion to the Hayden/Wark book. Burchell, et. al. puncture the common refrain that only uncontrolled development is economically viable.