the photo project: Aerial Project- part 1

For the past year, I have been working on a project of pseudo aerial photographs. I have always loved aerial photographs, but unfortunately I do not own a plane and coincidentally am deathly afraid of heights. I suppose that this project came as a happy compromise for me. In addition, I am very interested in creating falsehood in my work. Previous to this project, I was making pictures of habitat dioramas in natural history museums and cages and tanks in zoos. I like what happens when the real and the recreated intersect. This group of aerial photographs is a work in progress and feels like an apt extension of the diorama work.

I am finding this project challenging because I am unsure where to find these pictures. I walk around staring at the ground, always trying to imagine that I am a giant looking down on a landscape. As can be imagined, there are lots of misses with this approach. The project is very slow moving, but I am really thrilled whenever I get a new image that fits in. I shoot with a Pentax 6x7 camera with a waist level viewer. Looking down through the viewer to see an image helps for me to image what the final photograph will look like. I am also trying to figure out how ambiguous I should be about the images. I'm not sure whether I should present them solely as aerial photographs, or if I should include in the title what they really are. The 1st image of the group, for example, is of tiny packing peanuts on the sidewalk in the West Village. I thought that it looked like a constellation, so I found images of constellations and tried to match the color to that of a grainy constellation photograph. I like this part of the project; that there is a way to monumentalize very ordinary trash on the sidewalk.

I have posted the aerial project below as a work in progress. I'm really excited to scan the new work from the last month. There are four new aerial photographs in that batch. I will post them once they are finished.

Four of these images were included in the July issue of Abe's Penny. For those of you that don't know about Abe's Penny, you should definitely check it out. They put out really beautiful work.