Photos are often seen as depicting only their content. The viewer forgets that what we see has been framed and manipulated for us. This seems to be especially true for aerial photography: we look at an aerial photo and see abstracted visual information, that is a field and that is a house. We see only what is there, which is all that is there.
“The Instrumental Image: Aerial Photography as Problem and Possibility,” which opened at the Benton Museum of Art on Aug. 15, asks the viewer to look further, to see the problems and possibilities that aerial photography offers. Solveig Nelson, the Benton’s recently appointed Curator of Photography and New Media, organized the show following its early concept phase.
The exhibit takes its name from Allan Sekula’s seminal 1975 essay, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” which examines aerial reconnaissance photos taken during WWI under the direction of Edouard Steichen. The Benton’s show considers how aerial photos have been used in projects of war and imperialism.
One tactical photo in the exhibit shows the ambiguous rectangular shapes of buildings and fields from above, its meaning hidden until the viewer reads its title, “Reconnaissance picture of the Nazi airfield and aircraft works at Villacoublay, near Paris, just four hours after a raid by Flying Fortress” (1943). In another, a piece of land would appear as only a grid of dark squares without its title, “Total area devastated by the atomic bomb strike on Hiroshima is shown in darkened area within the circle on photograph” (1945).
This destruction of context which aerial photography performs, becomes, in wartime reconnaissance photos, a tool for surveillance and information-gathering.
“Aerial photos look very aestheticized somehow, like divorced from their context,” museum visitor Juna Hume Clark PO ’27 said.
This divorce — what Sekula called a “quest for transparency” — is weaponized. The tactical aerial photo captures an object in its frame and decides that it exists. That object is then able to be categorized into either enemy or not enemy. When photographed, a person or thing becomes a singular signal that must fit into this binary.
“What do we responsibly do with this loaded history?” Nelson said. “[The show] is the beginning of a question.”
“The Instrumental Image” calls attention to aerial photography beyond just its violent potentials, also tracing what Nelson called a “B-side or a kind of alternative history of aerial photographs, where people were using it in order to sometimes actually humanize something.’”
According to Nelson, these photos use the aerial view as a way to “offer a new way to see a place that we think is familiar, to kind of defamiliarize the way we think about our environment.”
They open up possibilities instead of closing them, looking at objects and sites in new ways instead of forcing them into a single meaning.
“You’re just trying to decide what to bomb next, right? But when you look at it, it might look like a beautiful landscape or an aestheticized landscape.”
Among this group of “humanizing” photos in the exhibit are works from the Benton Museum’s large collection of wire photographs (images transmitted via electrical impulse), photos of or responding to protest movements, landscape photography and other contemporary works by conceptual photographers.
“I think the photos that caught my attention the most were the photos of student protests, especially at Kent State University,” attendee Dora Wang PO ’27 said. “It resonated with me a lot because of what’s been happening on campus and across the U.S., across the world.”
Several of these contemporary photos use an aerial perspective to reference historical moments and sites, in turn responding to the medium’s complex history.
Among rows of black and white images, Stan Douglas’ large color photo, “New York City, 10 October 2011,” takes up a whole wall. One of four prints in his 2021 series “2011 ≠ 1848,” the image restages the arrest of a protester during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Similarly, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s 2018 photo essay, “The Geography of Oppression,” uses aerial views of Memphis, Chicago and Baltimore to visualize how the cities were affected by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination 50 years after the fact.
In his essay, Sekula uses a number of different terms to describe aerial reconnaissance photos: artifacts, records, tools, artworks, decorations, commodities and relics. Conceived as functional objects that yet made their way into exhibits and museum collections, the images don’t fit easily into any one of these categories.
“I think to me photography has always been somewhat of a tool to depict things,” Wang said. “Before [seeing the exhibit], I’ve only thought about photos as depicting a story.”
Juxtaposed with photos by contemporary conceptual artists, the supposedly tactical or functional aerial photos become art objects. In this way, the line between artwork and tool is blurred.
To see reconnaissance photos as art objects is to disrupt their original operations, which take their content as a singular truth, and situate them in a wider field of possibility. In viewing them as artworks deserving of a considered look, the exhibit opens them up to broader interpretation.
“You’re just trying to decide what to bomb next, right? But when you look at it, it might look like a beautiful landscape or an aestheticized landscape,” Nelson said.
The symbols of “field” and “house,” instead of being assigned to “enemy” or “not enemy,” suddenly might mean multiple things.
“I don’t think [the exhibit] is problems versus possibilities,” Nelson said. “In many cases, it’s both in the same site.”
The work of “The Instrumental Image,” and of us as viewers, is to skew these photos into possibility.
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