"When I come on something
interesting," says aerial photographer Robert Hartman, "I start to
make as tight a circle as I can, maybe the width of a couple of football
fields. I'm usually shooting out of the rear half of the sliding window, to
avoid my wing struts. I turn over my left shoulder to shoot, my knees on the
stick controlling the bank, my feet on the pedals controlling the rudder.
What I'm doing is cross-controlling, so I'm going as slow as possible,
catching a few seconds in my circle when I'm not turning. It's about 80 to
90 miles an hour, shooting as parallel to the ground as possible, and
keeping my camera just inside the window, away from the wind stream, which
would buffet it."
We are on tour of Robert Hartman's
"studio," those parts of the San Francisco Bay estuary that lie
within an hour's flying time of his Oakland, California, home. Fifteen
hundred feet below is is the site of one of Hartman's most arresting aerial
photographs -- a solitary, white, electric transmission tower amidst a whirl
of green wheat Hartman is describing the peculiar aerial maneuver he used in
taking the picture in flying parlance, it is known as an "exaggerated
slip." It was taught to Hartman in 1946, when he was learning to fly,
as a way to lose altitude without gaining speed while coming in for a
landing. As he now employs the slip, it is probably the closest thing there
is to treading air.
"The nose-up attitude can only be held
with a plane that won't stall. That's the comfort of my practically
unstallable old Piper," he says. "All the while, I'm sneaking
looks every few seconds for other air traffic. I manage about three shots
before I start to overfly what I'm concentrating on and have to turn back to
reestablish my turn."
By training, Robert Hartman is a painter. He
is currently senior professor of art at the University of California at
Berkeley. Throughout his career he has striven to create images that, as he
says, "momentarily disorient" the eye through interplay of vivid
color and tense but ambiguous form. Over the past 12 years, the quest for
such images has increasingly found fulfillment in aerial landscape
photography.
The reason Hartman takes his aircraft into
maneuver -- safely above prescribed altitude levels, he hastens to add:
1,000 feet in populated areas, rarely under 500 in the countryside -- is so
he can aim his camera straight down as much as possible. In this way he
isolates rectangles of color and form, which, he says, "hover between
recognition and mystery." When I ask how he compares his approach with
that of William Garnett, a well-known pilot photographer and also a friend,
Hartman balks a bit, "I've sort of made it a point not to look at his
work very much. An old painter friend said, 'You can't walk along the
seashore without inhaling salt air.' I don't want to unconsciously
assimilate something and then dump it."
I prod a little, suggesting that in Garnett's
work one sees more horizons and vistas, more purple mountains' majesties and
amber waves of grain. As one might expect from someone who has trained as a
painter, Hartman betrays a greater interest in pure form and depth of color.
He responds reluctantly, "One thing I have tried to pursue in my art is
a measure of ambiguity. The best way to do that is to take small bites. Bill
takes bigger bites. I hate to nail things down to a single meaning. I don't
think 30 years of looking and painting is such bad preparation for doing
photographs."
The defensive edge may come from his having
heard from at least one curator that his photographs look too much like
paintings. He's still mad. "That's irrelevant and preposterous,"
he says in rebuttal. "Who could confuse a painting with a photograph?
Why have those photo-realist paintings hanging in there?" Then be
becomes philosophical. "It's interesting that an identical comment,
depending on where it's coming from, can either be a very high compliment or
an outrageous insult." It occurs to me that "Rushing Hills"
with its disorienting impression of green brushstrokes, is a sly riposte.
Today, however, the brown land around the
tower bears no resemblance to the photograph. "Rushing Hills" is
persuasive evidence for Hartman's conviction that "I think what we
discover is often greatly superior to what we can invent. That may sound
strange for a painter to be saying, but invention is a kind of willing into
existence. I like what the American painter Philip Guston said, that to will
a form is to bring about a distortion. One of the things that bugs me about
so much photography I see today is that it's so strained, forced, arbitrary,
hysterical. What I look for is both painting and photography is a sense of
genuineness without evidence of fabrication, a kind of natural revelation of
something miraculous."
The uninteresting, furrowed terrain we next
fly over is an example of how variables beyond Hartman's control -- shifts
in season, light, an irrigator's or plowman's decision -- can transform the
landscape. When he gazed down on this plot a few years ago, he was
dumbstruck by what looked like shimmering rows of angled paper clips.
"They weren't tractor marks, but channels, I suppose, to direct
irrigation water. I've never seen them before or since, anywhere. I have no
idea how they were dug. It's completely nondescript today." He does not
seem displeased that they have vanished. "The traces of man's presence
can be jarring, bizarre, enigmatic, or exquisitely beautiful," he says.
"Down on the ground you're in a maze you can't really grasp. Up here
the maze gives up its secrets. I can choose the critical, small, vivid parts
that satisfy my impulse toward clarity and mystery."
Hartman describes life on the ground as
"irritating intervals between flights." Over the past months, he's
been away from his plane and cameras, but he has suffered worse exiles from
the skies. In the 1960s, when he was a fledging instructor at the University
of California at Berkeley and struggling to support his wife and two
youngsters, Hartman found himself "dying by inches" from not
flying. His obsession to get above it all began before his interest in
painting or photography. Hartman has a dim memory of being up in a Waco
biplane in Toledo, Ohio, when he was perhaps four. Although his father and
brother flew, Hartman was the first member of his family to get a pilot's
license in 1948. He was 21, and at about the same time, he came under the
influence of painter/educator Vaclav Vytlacil during a summer session at the
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. "He made it clear that painting
should be an extension of one's life; that with that sort of urgency, fused
with rigorous organization, one had something that mattered." After
receiving his M.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Hartman
painted and flew, "but the thought of combining them never occurred to
me."
It was not until those lean, early years at
Berkeley that Hartman experienced the truth of his teacher's words. "I
was 37, and, up to then, how to put a painting together was still a worry.
My airplane paintings began in 1963, and they continued until 1967. I wasn't
able to fly, and what was so important about those lifesavers was that, for
the first time, I didn't give one thought to making a painting. It never
entered my head. My whole aim was to make something as intensely real as
memories of flying."
The 30 to 40 oil and Verifax collages Hartman
did then seem to convey an ache and yearning altogether absent from his
photographs, yet to him they evoke something that is more intrinsic in
photography. "Painting focuses me usually on the present. It's here,
now, tangible. But photographs divert me from the present. The thing I find
terrifically moving about photography is its melancholy. I have a collection
of daguerreotypes, and they're so profoundly elusive and sad."
Hartman taught extra hard in the summer of
1969, saving enough to purchase Piper Clipper the following year. Almost
immediately, he became fascinated by the scenes of revelatory pastoralism
and gorgeous pollution that lay in his aerial neighborhood. Photography
quickly enabled him to combine his passion of flying and painting. His
initial photographs were taken as sketches for his paintings, but gradually
they became a preoccupation in their own right, especially when he began
printing them himself. "Now they're the strongest, best images I can
produce."
As we approach the Dunnigan Hills, a site he
came upon in 1976 and has since photographed many times, our pilot lets
Hartman take the controls for leisurely 360-degree turn at 2,800 feet. We
are flying in a rented plane because Hartman's Clipper is undergoing a
resheating in white fabric. The herding of earth forms below us come
sensually alive. The bulges, dimples, and clefts of dun ground cover shift
in depth and tone like a 3-D plastic postcard. "Usually I've got my
camera around my neck," he says. "If it's bright enough I'll shoot
at a minimum of a 500th of a second, but a 250th is usable. At anything
slower you have to have absolutely calm air; otherwise bumps are going to
fuzz up your picture. I take care to keep my arms free of contact with the
airplane. One camera is on the seat beside me. If the color is really
robust, then I'll probably go for the 4.5X6cm (1-5/8 X 2-1/4 inches) Mamiya
for the sake of resolution when I print. If the color is more subtle, what
I'll often do is use the polarizing filter on the 35mm Nikkormat because it
intensifies the chroma but doesn't alter the hues. It has greater effect
with the 35mm than with the Mamiya."
Even in this washed-out noonday light, the
navels and bellies of the Dunnigan Hills tense and squirm, then quickly
flatten out as we circle. "On the tightest turn," Hartman says,
'You're not going to be directly above, so relationship to the sun is
crucial. That's why I like to shoot in early morning or late afternoon. My
lens choice is a matter of how obliquely or how vertically I'm shooting. If
it's obliquely, I'll use the 200mm lens on the 35mm camera because it keeps
the perspective convergence from sucking the picture away. If I'm near
vertical, I'll use the standard 50mm. With my Mamiya 645, it's the same
reasoning, whether I use the 210mm or the 80mm. With a 35mm camera, I find
ASA 64 gives me enough speed, and the grain difference between it and ASA 25
isn't that much. I shoot Ektachrome 200 professional film when I use the
Mamiya although Ektachrome doesn't give me the color saturation Kodachrome
does."
As our two hours in Hartman's 200-mile-wide
studio are almost up, we head home, flying over the fierce beauty of
Richmond's industrial area. I question Hartman about his attraction to all
this. "Poisons are manmade," he says. "I'm less enthralled
with people than with the traces they leave. In a lot of ways, I think that
mankind is the most unhappy things that ever happened to this planet. Be
better off turned back to the birds." He checks his pessimism.
"It's humankind as an aggregate, from the small crowd up, that makes me
nervous and negative."
As we dip and wobble on our approach to
Buchanan Field, I remember something Hartman said on our drive to the
airport. He was flying with his father, coming in for a landing at Gilpin,
Arizona, perhaps 40 years ago. "The air was absolutely quiet. Not a
tremor. As we came over those wires and pulled the nose up, the airplane
angled toward the sun. The prop made those flickering strobe-like shadows.
This airplane had metal pants on the wheels, and I could hear the grass
ticking on them, and we weren't even down yet. My most vivid remembrances
are of small details, rather than big comprehensive things; that goes for my
photography as well."
__________
Nabokov, Peter. "Flight
Patterns." Camera Arts. Jan. 1983, pp. 36-45, 82.
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