The View from above: Photo essay

[G Benaim]

Hi everyone,

I just put together a little photo essay on my new blog (http://www.gabrielbenaim.blogspot.com), wanted to hear what people think. Maybe we can talk about it here after you've gone thorugh it. It's my first time doing this kind of thing, so I'd also appreciate any technical feedback. Thanks,

GB

[Charles Carstensen]

Well done. You have put a lot of effort into both the site and the blog, and it shows.

[G Benaim]

Thanks, Charles, what did you think of the photo essay?

[Brian Ellis]

I thoroughly enjoyed the essay and the photographs. You could go way back - to Nadar in the mid-1850s - for inspiration. The desire to photograph from unusual vantage points, especially a "bird's eye" view, seemed to originate almost simultaneously with the invention of photography. Of course as you point out in your essay, it's no longer new but that doesn't diminish the interest. Thanks for posting your essay.

[G Benaim]

Hi Brian, glad you enjoyed looking through it. I limited my scope basically to my immediate sphere of influences and connections, wasn't really trying for an art-historical perspective. Varnedoe does that perfectly, and looks at Nadar's views from a balloon. I don't go into any detail in my photo essay, but Varnedoe's main point is to challenge the idea that this perspective was something new made available by technology, i.e. hot air balloons. That's a basic approach of the book as a whole, to argue that the point of such new interests in modern art has more to do with their meaning as artistic expression rather than as expressions of a new social or technical fact. As he says, anybody who went to the top of Notre Dame and looked down got the same effect hundreds of years before anyone started painting or photographing from that perspective. So the real question, the interesting question, is why all of the sudden people did.