Aerial View
About
Peril and perseverance have long been the photographer's purview, perhaps to most dizzying effect in aerial photography. For the first aerial photograph in 1858, French photographer Félix Nadar had to solve the problem of the existing "wet plate" technology for photographs, which required processing within 20 minutes; he built a portable dark-room and, with it, flew over rural France in a hot air balloon. Luckily for today's photographers, airplanes, helicopters, and tall towers offer ample (and safer) opportunity to photograph the ground below. But the aerial view has continued to evince excitement: In 1928 Laszlo-Moholy Nagy produced an iconic image of the ground from Berlin's Radio Tower, and contemporary Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri takes the bird's eye view to new heights.
