Interpreting a 1930s aerial survey photograph: the artfulness of technological images

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Notes

1. The first known balloon photograph was taken by Gaspard Felix Tournachon (pseudonym Nadar) over Paris in 1858. The first recorded American image is an 1860 view of Boston by J.W. Black. The earliest guidebook to balloon photography is Gaston Tissandier’s La Photographie en Ballon (1886). For a comprehensive discussion of early balloon photography, see Newhall, Airborne Camera.

2. My forthcoming book, Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies, focuses on the origination of modern aerial vision and its cultural impact in early twentieth-century America; the second chapter, from which the present article is drawn, examines the development of aerial photography with specific focus on the agricultural landscape of the Midwest. For a general history of aviation’s cultural role in the early twentieth century United States and elsewhere see, Corn, The Winged Gospel; Pisano, Airplane in American Culture; Wohl, Passion for Wings; Wohl, Spectacle of Flight. The critical bibliography of aviation’s impact on landscape representation is disperse and difficult to encapsulate. A few recent engagements include: Corner and Mclean, Taking Measures; Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye; Fox, Aeriality; Morshed, ‘Aviator’s (Re) Vision’; Schnapp, ‘Propeller Talk’; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Weems, ‘Aerial Views’; along with technical essays in numbers too great to list on the application of aerial photography and remote sensing.

3. Memorandum from Austin Patrick, Acting Chairman of the Subcommittee on Aerial Photography, 7 June 1937, General Files of the Soil Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture, United States National Archives, College Park, MD.

4. I use the term panoptic to indicate a systematic ordering mechanismsh of social control through processes that are both actuated and emblematized by a panoramic, all seeing construction of vision. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

5. The basis for the sectional grid was established by the federal government in the Land Ordinance Act of 1785. This document established regulations for the survey and distribution of all new lands in United States. The underpinnings of the law lie in the romantic agrarian philosophies of Thomas Jefferson. For a more extensive discussion of the survey system, see: C.A. White, A History. For discussion of the rectangular survey’s cultural and artistic impact see R. White, It’s Your Misfortune, 137–55, and Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, passim. The rectangular survey is also the topic of chapter one in my forthcoming book Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies.

6. The 160 acre quarter was the smallest land division still bounded by public roadways and, not coincidently, also the median size for an Iowa farm in 1939.

7. See Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies, chap. 1.

8. My understanding of the aerial photograph’s ability to clarify both industrial and organic order is shaped by Corner and McClean, Taking Measures, 15–16. Other influential texts include McHarg, Design with Nature, and Kostof, America By Design.

9. The early twentieth century bibliography on aerial photography is filled with books and technical manuals explaining how to interpret the images, for a contemporaneous example, see Reeves, Aerial Photographs.

10. ‘AAA Plans to Map 350,000 Square Miles of Farm Land From the Air as Part of 1937 Conservation Program,’ Agricultural Adjustment Administration Press Release, 10 May 1937.

11. The files of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration are thick with such commentary. A particularly lucid description of the intentions behind the use of aerial survey appears in the transcript of a radio interview conversation between H.R. Tolly, an Agriculture Adjustment Administration Administrator and Morse Salisbury of the United States Department of Agriculture Office of Information, that was originally broadcast on 21 December 1937; transcript on file at the National Agriculture Library, Beltsville, MD. For an insightful summation of Department of Agriculture adoption of aerial survey, see Monmonier, ‘Aerial Photography,’ 1257–61.

12. For example, Roy Stryker, Head of the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration (the agency responsible for the famous FSA social documentary photographs, was major proponent of the cultural value of aerial survey images. In a 1940 essay on FSA photography, coauthored by Paul Johnstone, he wrote that an Illinois aerial survey view similar to that of Grundy County ‘reveals the independent farmstead, squared fields and highways, with the type of economic and social organization implicit therein.’ Its ‘significance as a cultural record,’ he continued, became clear when one compared the view to images of other agricultural regions in Europe and elsewhere. See Stryke and Johnstone, ‘Sources for Cultural History.’ I discuss Stryker and FSA photography at length in Barnstorming the Prairies.

13. Monmonier, ‘Aerial Photography,’ 1258.

14. The term ‘sky snoops’ became a ubiquitous phrase for critics of New Deal agricultural policy. For a representative example of its use, see Mark Sullivan, ‘The New Invasion of Farm Privacy Seen in A.A.A. “Sky Snoopers”,’ New York Tribune, 20 June 1938.

15. There were a broad array of economic benefits associated with New Deal agricultural programs, including: commodity price supports, loans, soil conservation subsidies, rural electrification, and technical advice, to name only a few. For more information, see Salutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal, passim. For other considerations of the impact of New Deal modernizing programs on the American landscape, see: Maher, Nature’s New Deal; Nye, American Technological Sublime; Smith, Making the Modern.

16. Agricultural Adjustment Administration Press Release, 20 May 1937 (note 10).

17. Daniel, ‘Command Performances,’ 40–1.

18. On the link between aerial survey photograph and modernist visual aesthetics, see Stein, ‘Good Fences.’

19. Daston and Galison, ‘Image of Objectivity,’ 123 and passim.

20. This lack of criticality might best be understood by comparing the limited analyses given to technological images to the deep and open-ended readings often offered for works of art. The difference perhaps relates to authorial intention in a way that equates the technological image to a condition of authorless and thereby straightforward communication of data and while positing for the artwork a subjective and intentional interruption of such clarity. While Daston and Galison have shown the notion of scientific objectivity to be itself a cultural construction, James Elkins argues against the idea that the technological image is authorless by arguing that scientific instruments actively construct a poins of view, which from a psychological stand point gives them a certain subjectivity that complicates and motivates the representations they enable. See Elkins, Object Stares Back, 63–85.