"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 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 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 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 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 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 he 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 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 in 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 ha 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
Dunningan Hills, a site he came upon in 1976 and has since
photographed many time, 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.