LIFE

Man has long sought views from above

Caroline Brooks
Special to the Statesman Journal
S.A. Andrée and Knut Frænkel with crashed balloon on the pack ice, photographed by Nils Strindberg, 1897.

On July 11, 1897, a trio of Swedish explorers — S.A. Andrée and two crew members, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg — took off in a hydrogen balloon from the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. Their goal was to circumnavigate the North Pole and arrive safely on the other side in Canada or Russia. However, shortly after lift-off, the guide ropes, which served to help steer and control elevation, fell off. To counteract the dispersion of weight, the crew released a heavy load of sand, sending the craft to an unmanageable height of 2,300 feet.

After three days of difficult travel north and loss of hydrogen from the altitude, the balloon crashed on the pack ice. Ill-equipped, they traveled south on ice floes for three months, finally reaching the uninhabited island of Kvitøya neighboring Spitsbergen. Based on the unintelligible writings found in their notebooks, they apparently passed away a few days later in early October with the approach of winter.

In 1930, 33 years after the explorers’ disappearance, their frozen remains were found along with personal belongings including canisters containing over 200 exposed negatives. Photographs were subsequently developed. Some revealed images of the flight, the crash and the men’s journey over the ice. Others were void of images and filled with visual noise — scratches, black stains and streaks of light — and were therefore ignored by historians.

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Danish artist Joachim Koester shared that story with me in 2004 while he was working on a film project focusing on the “empty” slides he later titled “Message from Andrée.” What fascinated him and subsequently stayed with me the last dozen years was what the visual noise symbolized. Buried in ice for 33 years, exposed to the damaging elements, imagery of the men’s journey was obscured by the marks left during those missing years. Searching through the haze for something recognizable, what is left borders between the visible and the invisible, a sense of hopelessness and sadness pervading.

I wonder if the expedition had been successful, what photographs would have returned? And, how would the men have described their aerial view of the arctic landscape? The area had yet to be reached in recorded history, and compounding the description would have been a view from above that had never been seen by human eyes.

Nadar with his wife, Ernestine, are pictured in a balloon, c. 1865 (printed 1890s).

Another early balloonist was French photographer Nadar (born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), whose first attempts at aerial photography in 1857 were initially unsuccessful since the hydrogen escaping the balloon reacted with the emulsion on the photographic plates, thereby producing a blackened image. After several more attempts, he finally realized the problem and, aloft over the French countryside, went on to capture the first known aerial photographs. Lacking language to describe this new perspective, he drew metaphors from literature and life.

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“Beneath us, as if to do us honour … the earth is unrolled in immense carpet without edges ... The fields in irregular checkerboard patterns have the air of those coverlets ... brought together by the patient needle of the housewife. It seems as if the bottomless toy box has just been spilled profusely over the earth, the earth that Swift revealed for us in Lilliput, as if all the toy factories of Karlsruhe had emptied their stock.”

The miniaturized buildings, roads and fields seen by Nadar mirror the views we see today as we peer out of a plane window during take off. Yet the more distant our view, the less we see of ourselves. Humans become dolls, then ants and specks before they disappear altogether. We are left with the geometric shapes of human development that interplay with organic, natural forms like an abstract painting or checkerboard coverlet. Shapes that are void of observable life, but that translate to marks of our existence.

Caroline Brooks is the gallery director at Salem Art Association.

Michael Boonstra’s “Spending Time in Places I’ve Never Been…(Djerassi #2),” 2015, is on exhibit at Bush Barn Art Center.

On exhibit

For more perspectives on views from above, visit the Bush Barn Art Center for the exhibition “Michael Boonstra: Between Horizons,” on display May 7 through June 25. Inspired by satellite imagery, Boonstra’s drawings, video and photography present aerial views in an effort to explore the vertical landscape and our place within it.


About this series 

Salem Art Association's series of essays addresses a need for more critical and analytical writing on contemporary art. This monthly series endeavors to create dialog among artists and writers and invites the community to engage in the arts on a critical level.

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