Aerial View of Rural Landscape with River, 1940s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Aerial View of Rural Landscape with River, 1940s — Archive & Atlas

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Aerial View of Rural Landscape with River, 1940s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1940–1950

AA-2026-CEDD50

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Someone flew a plane over farmland and took a photograph out the window, which was the kind of thing that felt like important documentation in the 1940s—proof that you could see the whole order of things from above, the patchwork fields and snaking river that some engineer had probably mapped, the scattered towns where people went about lives that looked, from five thousand feet, like a perfectly rational system. The photograph has the soft colour saturation of early Kodachrome, that blue-green wash that made midwestern landscapes look vaguely dreamlike even when they were just the same tidy grid they had always been. What the photographer thought they were recording was the organised landscape, the evidence of civilisation and control. What they actually caught was the moment before anyone had to think about what happened when you looked at your own country from the outside and found it both impressive and indifferent to your presence in it.

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