Aerial View of Eroded Canyon Badlands, American Southwest, 1950s

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Aerial View of Eroded Canyon Badlands, American Southwest, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Aerial View of Eroded Canyon Badlands, American Southwest, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-83F0C2

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Sometime in the 1950s, someone persuaded a pilot to fly low enough over a deeply eroded canyon system in the American Southwest that the full spectacle of a few hundred million years of geological indifference could be captured on color film. The layered badlands below — their pale striations recording epochs that predate anything a human being has ever thought was important — stretch toward a flat-topped mesa on the horizon, while a thin thread of a seasonal wash winds through the canyon floor as though it hasn't yet noticed it carved the whole thing. This was the era when postwar Americans discovered the West from the air rather than from the window of a station wagon, and a great many of them came back with color slides that tried to communicate a scale no slide could communicate. The erosional formations visible here — the serrated ridgelines, the receding cliff faces, the layered sedimentary benches — are consistent with the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, where the geology does the dramatic work and the visitor simply tries to point a camera in the right direction. What the person holding the camera believed they were capturing was majesty; what they actually captured was evidence that the landscape was utterly unaware of being photographed.

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