Nadar and the Aerial Perspective
Cartoon from the 2 June 1867 issue of La Lune, featuring a caricature of Nadar dangling high in the air from a balloon. Originally drawn by André Gill.
As an architect, I’ve been trained to understand space through plan, section and elevation. These are abstract ways of representing a building, in the same way that a map is an abstraction of a place. When humans experience space, we use our binocular vision to perceive depth, which is much more experiential than a map or plan drawing can ever hope to be. Whenever I travel to a new place, I like to study maps of the area beforehand to get my bearings, so I’ll be a bit more familiar with it once I arrive. I’m always struck by how little the maps actually prepare me for the experience of it, however. This is most apparent in hilly areas, with lots of varied terrain. Maps make an area more legible because they abstract the experience into a flattened aerial view, so changes in topography don’t get in the way. When looking at a map, you can instantly cross mountains and valleys to understand what’s on the other side or what’s around that bend, but when you’re at ground level the landscape reveals itself to you as you travel through it. Before air travel became commonplace, humans really only had maps and high places to understand their landscape from above. It was balloon travel that first gave us the ability to rise above the surface and experience a true aerial perspective.
Pictured above is Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known by the pseudonym Nadar, who was a French photographer in the nineteenth century, just when aeronautics and air travel were entering popular culture. He was fascinated by human flight, and in 1858 he became the first person to successfully take aerial photographs while he was in a balloon. He subsequently commissioned balloons to be designed and built, and he would allow passengers to take flights with him. He also published a magazine that focused on air travel, and established the world’s first airmail service. He was no doubt obsessed with verticality, and his aerial photographs mark a major turning point in the history of human flight.
A photograph from the air gives a person a new understanding of their surroundings. They do this much more effectively than a map, because they can still convey the three-dimensionality of a space. These photographs meant the aerial perspective was no longer at the whim of an artist’s imagination; Nadar had properly documented the experience. Pictured below is his first aerial photograph, taken around 520 meters, or 1,705 feet, above Paris. It may not look like much, but this was the first time the people of Paris had seen their city from above in this way. This wasn’t taken from a hilltop or high building, it was taken at a place high in the air that was previously unreachable.
Nadar’s first aerial photograph, taken in 1858 above the city of Paris.
The aerial photographs were a hit with the public, and Nadar became something of a celebrity for his aerial exploits. The magazine-cover-caricature at the top of this post and the portrait shown below illustrate this. These publications weren’t advertising the photos themselves, but rather the person taking the photos, as he flies high above the ground. This goes to show how revolutionary his photographs were, and how air travel had caught the public’s imagination. In a way, Nadar had produced a link between the abstracted map view and the ground-level experience that I described above.
In the above photo, we can start to understand what a map of this area would look like, because we can see above the buildings and how they’re arranged in the cityscape. It’s still a bit low to fully understand the layout of the streets and buildings, however. What we can do is understand depth and height quite easily. Taller buildings get in the way of shorter ones, much like they do at the surface. If this photo was taken at twice the height, it would most likely hit the sweet spot of showing the best of both worlds.
Lithograph from the 25 May 1863 issue of Le Boulevard by Honoré Daumier, titled Nadar élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l'Art, or Nadar Elevating Photography to Art.
At the end of the day, each of the three perspectives discussed here convey information about a place in different ways. A map is intended to provide information on the landscape when viewed from straight above, without depth.[1] Our experience at ground level gives us a three-dimensional understanding of the landscape, but it’s nearly always incomplete. This incompleteness provides a much more rich experience, however, because there’s an element of exploration and reveal to go along with it. Lyn Lofland once wrote that incompleteness gives reign to imagination, and I believe this captures the ground-level experience perfectly. After all, if I was able to fully experience what a place would be like from a map or a photo, the actual experience wouldn’t be nearly as delightful as it always turns out to be.
Read more about the history of human flight here.
[1] : To be fair, maps can include elements such as topography lines, which will convey information about the three-dimensional landscape, but these pale in comparison to a ground-level perspective.