Balloons and Landscape

Robert Doty’s reading, “Alotf…With Balloon and Camera,” emphasized the journey that the world embarked of capturing photographs from a balloon. It was interesting to read what hardships photographers had to overcome in order to capture photographs from an aerial perspective. The idea of photographing landscape from an aerial point of view reminds me of our lectures in class. It is important when talking about landscape is that “it can be seen from a single viewpoint” as our Professor has mentioned. When looking at the earth from a balloon, you are able to view a large amount of space. More landscape than you can see from a high cliff or a tall building. Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, called Nadar, was one of the first to invent the idea of photographing from a balloon which occurred in 1856. It’s incredible to think that many people before the mid-1850s that human kind were unable to capture a majestic view and a view that could help solve many questions that people had about the earth. After many balloons and many years of attempts to photograph the landscape from a balloon, it was not until 1935 that people were able to see the difference between the troposphere, the stratosphere, and the actual curvature of the earth. This relates to the reading, “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger and how he describes “landscape as ideology.” Once man was able to uncover a huge way of seeing, we are able to apply the relation between what we see and what we know and what we haven’t known. By seeing the landscape from a bird’s eye view, we are able to create more precise maps, answer historic questions about the landscape, and expand our knowledge of what we haven’t known.