Newhall B. Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space

Hastings House, 1969. — 154 p.With flight through the air and now in Outer space a reality, our vision of the world and the universe has expanded far beyond our prevision or even imagination. Photography can hold still the Meeting glimpses of the world as seen by flyers: indeed it makes visible, through remote space-borne cameras, what man himself has not yet seen.The camera, first airborne in 1858, has looked down upon the earth from balloons, kites, rockets and airplanes. These airviews were at first strange novelties; since they did not conform to the anthropoeentric vision of established perspective they were hard to understand, even bewildering. But the new vision soon became accepted, as air travel became common, as painters experimented with abstractions to emphasize form, and as the usefulness of aerial photography became apparent.This book traces the growth of the expanded vision of our world which we owe to flight and photography. It is not a technological treatise, but a presentation and explanation of new visual dimensions.