Page 128 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (Nadar): Aerial Photographs of Paris c1870
Nadar’s earliest aerial photographs, taken from a tethered balloon over Paris date from 1866 - but these early shots have been lost. A photographic visionary and evangelist of new photo-applications, from the 1850s Nadar was convinced that photography would change military intelligence through improved cartography and surveillance/reconnaisance, and made these images in the 1860s to establish his point. No simple specialist, Nadar was a really notable caricaturist, a portrait photographer (his pictures of a young Sarah Bernhardt, apparently nude, draped in black velvet are exceptional), and he was also an inventor, creating a giant balloon (le Géant 1863) for long-distance flights, and creating new lighting for photographing his explorations of the Paris catacombs (around 1861) - the hundreds of miles of ancient tunnels and cellars beneath Paris. In a period of rapid innovation in the imaging arts, with stereoscopy, grimatiscopes, cartes de visite, colour experiments, cyanotypes, ghost or ‘spirit’ photography, books illustrated by tipped-in photographs, cabinet cards, early photo-montage etc etc, Nadar is an important player, combining aesthetics and technology in new ways.
At this time, the American James Wallace Black was also making images from a hot-air balloon, and it is his ‘Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.’ (see next page, 1860) that is the earliest surviving aerial photograph. Nadar was absolutely correct in his predictions of the military uses of aerial photography. By 1918, the British Royal Flying Corps had made nearly half a million reconnaissance photographs, and developed both high-resolution cameras (images taken at 15,000 feet could be enlarged to resolve a footprint on the ground); and the means to interpret these images - including by 1917-1918, stereoscopic cameras. Appropriately for Nadar, it was the French with their Aéronautique Militaire (air-force) who were the first to establish a reconnaissance squadron, flying Farman biplanes with vertically mounted cameras attached to the crew and engine nacelle just forward of the lower wing. The open-plan grid construction of the plane provided a good all-round observation perspective for human reconnaissance, or eg using modified Graflex camera, taking half-plate and roughly quarter-frame (6 x 9 cm) film negatives. Aerial surveillance photography by the RAF played a major part in the identification of the V1 and V2 rocket-launch sites in WW2, helping save Britain from rocket bombardment.