Arts
Wonders of the world
John McEwen
The View from Above: 125 years of aerial photography (The Photographers' Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street, WC2, till 28 January)
Pilgrims: photographs by Marketa Luskacova
(V & A till 26 February) 4 We cease to wonder at what we understand,' said Dr Johnson, and it is still often a criticism of photography that it has taken the imaginative fun of art out of life precisely by destroying some of that wonder. Perhaps all photographs can be held to repudiate this charge, because it is innate to the medium that it stands as a witness to the transience of things, and many of the greatest photographs by the greatest photographers have surely been those that emphasised this most poignantly and symbolically. But aerial photography, though most hauntingly speaking of tran- sience and adding a philosophical dimen- sion to it, reveals wonders all its own never more so, judging from The View from Above, than when there was no artis- tic motive.
The inter-relation of art and photo- graphy is nevertheless more blatant in this photographic exhibition than most, and that too should lower the resistance of some of those who still feel modern art, at least in its more abstract forms, to be either inconsequential or a hoax. Much is made of an early Hemingway quote: 'We headed almost straight east of Paris ... and the ground began to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares, and big flat blotches 'It's not fair!' of green where there was a forest. I began to understand cubist painting.' Much em- phasis should be placed on the word 'began', but Hemingway all the same discloses the most novel and far-reaching introduction of Cubism — the destruction of vanishing-point perspective. Aerial photographs undoubtedly contributed to painting's move to the abstract, just as a more abstract painting helped in the inter- pretation of aerial photographs. Much of this was consciously undergone on both artistic sides. There were aerial photographers like Moore-Brabazon, the pioneer British photo pilot of World War* who proposed a 'pictorial branch' of aerial photography in 1918. And there were painters like Filippo Marinetti, the Futurist, who ten years later proposed a new form of painting, aeropittura. But the sections most full of wonder in this exhibition (in which there are surely too many photographs on the walls and not enough in the catalogue) are those devoted to war and archaeology. The war photo- graphs are both chilling and, especially when coupled with a reading of Ursula Powys-Lybbe's account of aerial photo- graphic interpretation in World War fascinating. No painting of World War I conveys the mud seas of Flanders s° awesomely as these views from the air, some of them taken from only a few hun' dred yards up during attacks. And the shadow thrown by a bomber on Ancenis on a lovely day in June 1944 is memorable in a way that the reverse, the bomber photo- graphed from Ancenis, would not be. The metaphorical richness of these photo- graphs, unintended or not, immediatelY transforms them into art.
Photographs of runways painted with
,,im bomb-craters to make Allied pilots think they are out of action, or the tell-tale scorch marks that first revealed the invention 01,. the jet-propelled ME262s, by contrast may never rise above documentation but are 11°, less intriguing for that. Archaeological photography is also documentary in intent, but is sometimes instrumental in revealing art-forms that would otherwise have re- mained hidden — at least one assumes the extraordinary land pictures at Nazca, designed to be seen from the air though made many centuries ago, can be classified as art in modern parlance. They are certain' ly one of the most mysterious feats of malt This branch of aerial photography, par- ticularly when it has to do with contours' also has the advantage of taking place at the most beautiful times of day, in the early morning or evening. It gives the Cambridge University Committee of Aerial Photo-
graphy's record of Roman Britain a poetic quality beyond research.
The exhibition finishes with images from outer space, often in the technical sense not really photographs at all. They are disap- Pointing, largely because the earth is so in- discernible. There is one particularly notable exception, however, and that is of Europe at night, which sadly reveals England to be eradiated like nowhere else how pleasantly dark it must have been a hundred years ago. But the world viewed from beyond has nonetheless irredeemably altered our relation to it. From being a col- onial mystery it has become a fragile resource in our safekeeping. Between 1967 and 1974 Marketa Luska- eova took photographs of the peasant peo- ple of Slovakia, the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia. Here the inhabitants have held their ground against communism and Industrialisation — they have no doubt relinquished something of their heritage since preserving their rural traditions and Reiman Catholic faith, the two finding fullest expression in a series of long- established Marian pilgrimages at high sum- mer. The photographs are in two parts the first of the 'Pilgrimages', the second, The Village' — showing the life and customs of some of the pilgrims. This is not Photography with any pretension to art, to the contrivance, in other words, of more by one reading. It simply lays something °Y for history, and is all the better documentation for the modesty of its aim.
Previous page
