Getting Some Perspective
e-flux
October 2025
As we myopically gaze at the handsets inches from our face, we are often encouraged by sensible apostles of “objectivity” to try and get some perspective; to zoom out, zoom up, and achieve something like a lofty bird’s-eye view on our situation.
The first moderns to attain this kind of vertiginous perspective did so at the risk of their own death. The pioneer of aerial photography is generally agreed to have been an eccentric cartoonist and balloonist called Felix “Nadar” Tournachon, who constructed a 60-foot hot air balloon he christened Le Géant, complete with an onboard dark room, to soar above Hausmann’s Parisian boulevards in the 1860s. Though his aerial photographs no longer survive, Nadar’s promethean ascent in his “giant” and the new perspective it augured captured the imaginations of everyone from Jules Verne to Honoré Daumier. Subsequent pioneers of aeronautical imaging, from Jules Neubranner’s Bavarian Pigeon Corps to Alfred Nobel’s rocket-mounted cameras in the 1900s, all intensified this ecstatic drive to escape our terrestrially-bound sightlines, until aerial photography from airplanes became ubiquitous for reconnaissance purposes during the First World War. […]