Aerial Photographic

Aerial Photographic

The technology of aerial photography stems from nineteenth century devices-the photographic camera and air travel-but it was conceived in social and technological forces that began at the dawn of Western civilization. It is thus central to the development of photography, even though it is rarely treated as a subject of commentary.

Arial photographs offer a geometrically determined view of objects within a given area. The origins of this view lie in the third millennium BCE, when Sumerian priests ruled city-states through estate management and a 919b121j religion based on sky gods. As conceived at the time, urban deities surveyed their domains from the sky, conveying legitimacy onto the priests, who realized the aerial view with surveying. Since then surveying has been essential to governance, and from it has come geometry and a cascade of geometric disciplines, notably perspectival drawing and classical optics, that led to the development of photography.

The uses of aerial surveys have change d little since the days of Sumer. Every day the infrastructure and citizens of advanced nations are photographed dozens of times by a vast network of cameras based on satellites, aircraft, buildings and poles. These cameras are are creating real-time maps of their subjects at scales ranging from the intimate to the global, and, as the first survey maps of Sumer, these automated mapmakers aid in governance of society and the control of resources.

The relation between photographs and maps may not be immediately obvious because most photographs are vertically stratified, that is they reveal the horizontal detail of their subject. However, when the picture plane of a camera is held parallel to the surface of the early, as in aerial photography, the inherently map-like nature of photography is intuitively obvious. Photographs and maps both reveal the spatial aspect of the environment, that is, the arrangement of objects on a plane in relation to one another. In both aerial photography and cartography, the vantage can offer chorographic view, or it can represent objects in their proper geometric form. Our visual intuition on the techniques of perspectival drawing that it automated.

Aerial photography began in the mid-1800s, some thirty years after the advent of photography. In 1858 the pioneering Parisian Nadar took a camera on a series of balloon ascents, and in 1864 he published a book about the experience, Les Memoires du Geant. On the other side of the Atlantic, J.W. black and Sam King ascended 1,200 feet in a balloon to take a photograph of Boston in 1860. it was war, however, that stimulated the development of aerial photography. Nadar refused his services to Napoleon III in 1859, but commanded the Paris balloon corps during the siege of the earl 1870s. by then the American Civil War had established a number of wartime precedents. As the war broke out in 1861 a civilian balloonist inadvertently flew over Confederate states. His report convinced the Union government to support the creation of the U.S. Balloon Corps, which operated until 1863. During that time photographers stationed in tethered balloons created large-scale maps of battlefields that were overlaid with grids to determine troop movements.

In the twentieth century, the prospects of aerial photography improved as did aircraft, cameras, and telemetry. Balloon reconnaissance continued in World War I, but by World War II lighter-than-air craft were replaced by  airplanes. Development intensified during the Cold War. In the 1950s high-performance spy planes cruised the stratosphere, but, with the Soviet downing of an American U-2 in 1960, officials on both sides of the conflict realized that orbiting satellites were the safest option. The Soviet Union orbited the first surveillance satellite, but it was rapidly followed by the corona program of the United States. The first generations of spy satellites ejected bulky containers of film into the atmosphere, but these were replaced by high resolution video signals.

To this day military and intelligence bureaus have been the prime innovators of aerial photography. Every aspect of he medium is subject to constant improvement. Airplanes and spacecraft have been improved, lenses have staggering resolution and digital technology has replaced analog signals. Aerial photography is of such importance that its full capabilities at any given time are a state secret. Surveillance programs were kept hidden for many years and there is a lag of decades between the collection of military photographs and their release for other uses.

The dominance of the United States at the end of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. The satellites of Russia, France and a few other space going nations