the aerial view- perspective - drawing gravity

1. Wyndham Lewis, Plan of War (painting now lost, from BLAST magazine 1914.

2. Eighteenth century garden design

3. photograph of marching policmen c1955

4. from My Picture Book of Planes Sampson Low Marston, London c1956.

5. woodcut from BLAST magazine

6. from Modern Mechanix May 1936, One of the Pioneers - Sherman Fairchild.

7. Baseball looking down on the plate c1953

8. bath from American advertisement advert for GATX (Transportation) Sept 1965 24 x26cms.

9. Heath Robinson from his book on marriage, the Wedding Feast

10. illustration by Grandville, c1843

11. A Public Place seen from the Air from J.Xaudaro, The Perils of Flight ,Garnier Freres, Paris 1911.

12. military fortifications - the geometry of defensible walls seen from above.

"No imagination can paint anything more beautiful than the magnificent scene now disclosed to our enraptured senses ; the multitude of human beings, the houses, the squares and streets, the high set towers gradually diminishing, while the deafening tumult became a distant murmur and finally melted into a deathlike silence." a balloon ascent, Berlin 1817, quoted in Newhall, beneath.

"The sky, hitherto man's roof, will become his pavement." F.Marinetti, 1912.

BOOKLIST (all titles London unless otherside stated)

B.Newhall Airborne Camera Focal Press 1969

Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings, Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908-1918, Yale 1994
Gail Buckland First Photographs Hale 1981
Plowden and Jeffrey Landscape Thames & Hudson 1984
R.M.Stanley World War II Photo Intelligence Sidgwick and Jackson 1982
E.M.Cortwright Exploring Space with a Camera NASA Washington 1968
Jon Darius Beyond Photography OUP Oxford 1984
Marilyn Bridges Markings , aerial views of sacred sites Phaidon Oxford 1986
L and B.Wolberg Zooming in , (microscopic photography) HBJ NY 1974.
J.K.St Joseph (ed) The Uses of Air Photography John Baker 1975

Images shown in the teaching session

1. The change in attitude, two approaches to Stonehenge.
2. first visions of the earth from above, 1858, Nadar's patent, Photographie Aerostatique, the automatic camera. Pigeons and the First World War.
3. the impact of aerial photography on art and photography, Robert Delaunay and the Eifel Tower. Other artists who were influences, Wyndham Lewis, Balla and Carra (the Futurists cult of flight and speed).
4. Contemporary aerial photography, William Garnett of Fortune Magazine, and Marilyn Bridges (see beneath).
Compilation film (with timings) 1. traditional images from aerial filming, the helicopter shot 1 , a conventional sequence, from the recent series of documentaries on the geographical history of the British Isles, ending in a lateral view of Beachey Head (2.07).
2. the helicopter shot 2; title sequence to The Shining (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980); the malign point of view (2.41).
3. techniques of aerial distortion, the camouflage of the landscape during war time, the extension of the Hamburg harbour front, the Disney suburb as camouflage (1.21).
4. the birds' eye view, the explosion at the gas station seen from above, the view of the malevolent (1.37)
5. the artist and photographer Nigel Henderson, seeing the visual links between the world seen from above, seen down a microscope and through the viewfinder of a camera. Filmed at Landermere Quay just before the artist's death (6.56). To see a personnage in the landscape, Nijinsky in The Spectre of the Rose.
6. Tex Avery, animation, Bugs Bunny and Willoughby fall to earth (1.38).
7. Talking Heads (David Byrne), excerpt from Story Telling Giant. (3.34)

ELSEWHERE