Description
Looking at the earth from directly above is a recent conquest. In 1858, from a tethered balloon over Petit-Bicêtre, near Paris, Nadar made the first aerial photograph; no print of it survives. The oldest that has come down to us was taken in Boston in 1860 by James Wallace Black, under a title that sums up the whole programme: “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It”. In 1888, at Labruguière in the Tarn, Arthur Batut hung a camera from a kite; a century later, Yann Arthus-Bertrand made the vertical view a shared language with Earth from Above, published in 1999 and then shown on the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens. This view has one peculiarity: it does away with the horizon. With neither sky nor vanishing point, the landscape becomes a surface, and the surface an image.
This photograph frames the precise point where two materials touch without merging. On the left, the pale sand stretches into long parallel crests, ribbed like a dune the water barely covers. On the right, the deep green hollows into rounded reliefs, submerged dunes revealed by the light through the water. Between the two, a sharp edge, almost ruled by the tide, where two white boats have stopped, the only measures of scale in this shifting geography.
The last part of the Ondulations series: after relief and surface, the edge. By the next tide the line will have moved; the image keeps the trace of a single day.
