CLAREMONT, CA.- The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College announced the opening of The Instrumental Image: Aerial Photography as Problem and Possibility, on view at the museum from August 15, 2024 to January 5, 2025. This exhibition is the first to be organized by the Benton’s new curator of photography and new media, Solveig Nelson. Nelson’s appointment was announced in January 2024, and she will officially join the museum full-time as the exhibition opens.

“Photography represents one half of our collection holdings. I am delighted that we are now poised to engage the complexity of these works with the critical eye and creativity that a scholar like Solveig Nelson adds to our community,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the museum. “The Instrumental Image signals the kind of nuanced provocations that we want to offer through our exhibitions, a first curatorial gesture that we hope will spark many further conversations about the process and promise of photography.”

The Instrumental Image, which includes more than 50 works from the Benton’s collection as well as loans from other institutional and private collections, charts the varied purposes aerial photography has served since its inception. Dating to the late nineteenth century, aerial photographs—initially called “bird’s-eye views”—have been taken from rooftops and hilltops, with balloons or kites, and by way of carrier pigeons outfitted with cameras. Due to these origins, aerial perspectives have tended to be interpreted as a non-human or technological way of seeing. During World War I, aerial photography—now taken from planes—became further distanced from “human” perspectives and became identified as an instrument of war; photographs taken at vertical or oblique angles from various elevations were used to predict the movement of troops, identify targets, and document bombing campaigns.

The title of this exhibition comes from “The Instrumental Image,” a landmark essay written in 1975 by the critic and conceptual photographer Allan Sekula. Writing about the intensification of aerial photography for the purposes of information gathering in World War I—in particular, the images taken by the American Expeditionary Forces photographic unit commanded by none other than pictorialist photographer Edward Steichen—Sekula asked what could be made of the “nearly mute picture[s]” that appeared as if abstract landscapes or cityscapes: “Are they records, tools, artworks, decorations, commodities, relics?” Sekula warned that our tendency to aestheticize views from the air risked minimizing the human and environmental costs of an aerial assault, fearing that “it might be possible to have one’s war and enjoy it too.”

While certainly intertwined with war and colonialism, however, aerial photography has produced its alternative histories, also presented in the exhibition. In the United States, photographer Roy DeCarava captured intimate scenes from Harlem recorded from above in the 1950s. By mid-century, aerial photographs had become instruments in multiple disciplines, such as geology and climate science. William Garnett, for example, was one of the first landscape photographers to specialize in aerial photography. He was commissioned in the mid-1950s to photograph the first privately developed real estate project to be incorporated as a city, Lakewood, CA. The resulting photographic series—included in part in The Instrumental Image— was simultaneously cherished by Lakewood’s developers and interpreted by environmentalists (Garnett included) as a documentation of disaster.

The Instrumental Image: Aerial Photography as Problem and Possibility brings together such case studies in “instrumental” aerial photography alongside artists’ creative questions about what it means to take a photograph from the air. From wire photographs (images transmitted via electrical impulses) to contemporary art or activist works in multiple photographic media by artists who have challenged the dominant use of aerial photography as an instrument of surveillance and state violence, the exhibition ultimately seeks to uncover the problems and possibilities inherent in the very notion of an aerial photograph.

Organized by Solveig Nelson, Curator of Photography and New Media