Aerial View

“Territories overlaid each other, or floated weightless, free of any known geography. The rivers riddled through worlds both real and false; they welled up in springs and fountains and gave out on great bleak estuaries and marshes. They ran through Dickens, George Eliot and the Bible, carrying bodies and babies in baskets. There was the Say and the Floss, Conrad’s glittering black Congo, the swift trout courses of Hemingway and Maclean, Huck Finn’s Mississippi, and the Thames of The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf.”

Laing, Olivia. To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canons Book 71) (pp. 55-56). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.

The territory of the river is the solid landscape. The human imposes another layer to this territory - a layer of intentionality that reforms not only the physical territory. For the human these are not only physical territories, but also reflections of internal territories, that become reflected outward to the physical landscape and inwardly affecting the human mental territory. Aerial photographs enables a viewpoint from above and the exploration of Deleuze and Guatarri concept of survol, which is is to survey subjectively as a whole.

At the beginnng of my PhD, I was lucky to be able to spend time in the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, where I was introduced to the first “All Scotland Survey” flown during 1987 and 1988, which produced black and white contact prints developed from panchromatic film. Nineteen years later, another plane mounted with a digital camera covered Scotland, this produced digital colour aerial photographs. I was able to scan the aerial black and white photos of the Dee cathcment, which then enabled me to form digital collages of both time frames: black and white aerial photos taken during 1987 and 1988 and colour aerial photos taken during 2007. This work acknowledges the aerial photography archived in the James Hutton Institue in Aberdeen.

Feugh Water

An aerial study of Feugh Water, taking into account the presence of water in relationship with topography.

The Dee River

An aerial study of the Dee River using aerial photographs taken during 1988 and 2007.