Few years ago, when I was skimming all those popular books in a bookstore, I found a book named Earth from Above: 366 Days and the spectacular photos in it impressed me a lot. That is how I learn Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Bertrand is a well-known French photographer. He started his career as a photographer at the late 70s when he was in Kenya studying the wildlife with his wife. With his aim to show the wildlife in image form, he published his first book Lions as to show the everyday life of the tropical animal. In the 80s, he turned to photo sports, nature and adventure, for example, he worked with zoologist Dian Fossey to capture mountain gorillas in Rwandan. And his works were published in many magazines like Geo, Life and National Geographic.
Among his works, Bertrand’s most famous project remains to the Earth from Above. In the early 90’s, he created an aerial-photography agency “ALTITUDE”. Later in mid 90’s, with the support of UNSECO, Bertrand’s project Earth from above started. The project aimed to convict the ecological problem through enormous numbers of aerial images documented the relation between human activities and environment for present and future generations. The project is then published into photo books of dozens of languages.
Earth from Above is perhaps one of the largest aerial photography project. More than 12000 photos were taken at over a hundred countries. Aerial photography is a kind of photo-taking from an elevated position which is commonly used for map making and military. And the technique depends a lot on aircrafts like balloons, helicopters or planes. The use of aircraft and photograph at a high attitude create numbers of technical obstacles.
These made Bertrand’s
Earth from Above worths praising as it had overcome many technical difficulties. Aerial-photography requires careful plan on schedule and route as well as good luck like having fine sunshine and cloudless sky. These are obviously seen from the photos of
Earth from Above, take the photo
ILLUMINATED GREENHOUSE NEAR SAUVO,
Varsinais-Suomi region,
Finland as an example, it is showing a bright greenhouse in the falling of dusk. The caption mentioned the illumination of the greenhouse is in fact using artificial light to extend the plants photosynthesis during the short daylight winter at high latitudes. This shows the careful plan of selecting subjects at the right time. At the same time, the vivid image depends on the good meteorological condition.
Then, Bertrand also do a great job in utilizing the form of aerial photography. As stated above, aerial photography take pictures from a high position, it enables a very different perspective to ordinary level-view. The bird-liked field of view may give an
unfamiliar image of the familiar things or an alienated image of unseen things. Take
The Nazca Astronaut, Ica Peru as an example, it shows the mysterious Nazca line which is not possible to read at level-view. However, the aerial photo can shows this bird-view-privilege relic to us. This doubtlessly illustrates Bertrand’s consciousness of utilizing the unique quality of aerial photography.
Among the techniques mentions above, Bertrand intends to show the human activities impact to the ecosystem and suggest importance of sustainable development. These message is more or less a cliche. And it is difficult to tell whether Bertrand’s project is better than other similar works. But some of his photos do shock, like
Icebergs and Adelie Penguins, Adelie Land, Antarctica, the message behind may be the combustion of fossil fuel causes global warming and the raise in temperature causes iceberg massively melt down in the two polars.
And a penguin was being trapped in the floating iceberg which may later starve to death. This incident may have been heard for thousands of time, but having an image that authentically presenting the particular penguin left alone on the floating ice do shock viewers. This is because this image is quite novel that such an exact image of a cliche is seldom seen of. And more importantly, it shows a fact that was there. The truthfulness of something that has been there shocks. Meanwhile, the underlying cliche message convicted from the photo is highly visualized from that poor penguin. And turning such global crisis into a comprehensible and collectable medium, photograph, may also shock viewers.
In the contrary, some of the photos are less straight-forward than the penguin photo. The meaning behind these photos are sometime not clear when we look at these photos alone. And these images often show a very tiny part of the whole and leave many truth behind. One of them is
Herd of Zelen on a road near Caceres, Mato Grosso de Norte, Brazil. In my opinion, it is hard to notice the truth behind it when looking into this photo, especially as a viewer without much knowledge about the present and past of Brazil. Some facts, like two guys on horses are herding their cattle, and the method of farming, may be read from the the photo, but no more deeper data can it gives the viewers. However, the caption
mentions much more background information and it suggests the land ownership problem in Brazil where most of the land are owned by a tiny portion of the population and many peasants need to work all across the country for the landlords. Only with this information, the photo becomes more complete which displays part of the agricultural problem in Brazil than only seeing the two men on horses herding. And this may be the reason why the project is published into photo-book which enables notions to be placed next to every photos for a better narration.
Bertrand, with his impressive photos in project Earth from Above makes him a well-known photographer. Many of his photos are really spectacular. Moreover, some of them, which is not limited to the penguin photo but more of them can be found on his books and website, do tell the urgency of conserving the ecology and environment. Then, Bertrand may want to display the inequality, like in the Brazilian peasants photos, or many other problems out there through his viewfinder. But some of these photos do not hit the point, to quote Susan Sontag’s saying, they hide more than it discloses. But I believe this is not an easy task for Bertrand or others to overcome since hiding more than disclosing is a native issue of photography. Anyway, this issue have been noticed and dealt with in Bertrand’s project by using notion to tell the hidden parts.
