AA-2026-A7B71F
On the image
Someone at altitude during the 1950s or early 1960s pointed a camera downward at the kind of cloud formation that pilots and aircraft photographers had begun to document with casual regularity—the kind of view that used to qualify as miraculous and had now become the ordinary reward for a commercial flight or a military training sortie. The sharp division between white cumulus and clear blue sky has the aesthetic quality of an accidental landscape painting, the sort of thing that would have seemed worth recording and filing away, evidence of the new privilege of seeing the earth from above. The dust and scratches on the film stock suggest this was neither archival material nor a particularly celebrated shot, just someone's record of what the world looked like from a window seat, taken during an era when such views were still novel enough to photograph but mundane enough that nobody expected the image to survive.
Visually related — by likeness
Aerial View of Cloud Bank, Mid-20th Century. 1950–1965. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A7B71F. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/aerial-view-of-cloud-bank-mid-20th-century.
@misc{aaAA2026A7B71F,
title = {Aerial View of Cloud Bank, Mid-20th Century},
year = {1950–1965},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A7B71F},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/aerial-view-of-cloud-bank-mid-20th-century}
}TY - ART TI - Aerial View of Cloud Bank, Mid-20th Century PY - 1950–1965 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A7B71F UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/aerial-view-of-cloud-bank-mid-20th-century ER -
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