Chrysler Building, New York City, 1988
© Marilyn Bridges
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From the vantage point of an angel, the earth must always be beautiful. From Marilyn Bridges's single-engine Cessna, hovering low at the approximate altitude of an angel with wing trouble, the earth tends to be dark, ambiguous, laced with a mournful poetry. The planet's skin is crumpled and worn and scarred with mysterious designs. Someone long ago left signs here, certain they would be recognized: giants and serpents, on a preposterous scale, that stared at the sky unseen till the advent of the airplane. Today the earth's surface is marked with highways and water towers and precisely plowed fields. Serpents, towers, plow marks – they all have a meaning, if only one knows the language.
– Vicky Goldberg
Marilyn Bridges, photographer, pilot and explorer, illuminates the bonds between the mark-makers of 3,000 B.C. and the builders of our modern cities. Ancient or contemporary, Bridges's landscapes serve the dual role of interpreting the power of extraordinary sites and creating visual records that may prove to be the only means of preserving these sites against the eroding elements of time and neglect.
– Willis Hartshorn |
The field of aerial photography has a distinguished history, dating back to the French society portraitist Nadar's overflying Paris in a hot-air balloon in 1863 (a Daumier lithograph documenting this publicity stunt, which was witnessed by a half-million people, is titled “Nadar elevates photography to the height of art”). In World War I, Captain Edward Steichen overflew the French town of Vaux , recording the utter devastation that the war had wrought. In more recent times Will Garnett, Emmet Gowin and Mario Giacomelli have each trained their cameras on the ground, capturing the unexpected abstract 2-dimensional designs that emerge from an airborne vantage-point. Yet none of these has made such a profound lifetime commitment to this mode of art – nor has touched more people through her numerous award-winning books and museum shows – than Marilyn Bridges. While her photos are taken from the air, her work is firmly grounded in a movement in contemporary photography, including her peers Mark Klett, Richard Misrach, and Robert Adams, in which landscape is inseparable from, and indelibly affected by, (an oft-times malign) human presence. Truth be told, what further distinguishes Bridges's work from that of her peers is her breath-catching fearlessness, which she attributes to her father: “He taught me to go into the fear rather than pull away from it.” Indeed, for many of her shots, she leans far out of the plane, headlong into the wind, with little or no physical restraints, and with a Zen-like confidence in her co-pilot's steady hand and judgment as he guides the plane ever lower and adjusts the speed ever slower.
Bridges's first body of aerial photography, made in Peru in 1976, captured the great mysterious linear carvings made by the Nazca culture from about 400 B.C. to 800 A.D. (or, according to the alternate hypothesis put forward by Erich Von Daniken in his best-selling Chariot of the Gods , made by extra-terrestrials for use as space-craft landing strips!). "I felt as though I was in the presence of a great force,” Bridges remembers, “a force that provided unity, that challenged the narrow perspectives of our lives by requiring us to step back enough to view the whole." The prints from this trip were exhibited to great acclaim at New York 's Museum of Natural History ; they remain among her most enduring work. Subsequently a Guggenheim Fellowship funded a year-long stint of work over the Americas , starting from Upstate New York and extending to the Yucatán. It was on this trip that she literally learned to pilot a plane “on the fly”: she would sit in the pilot's seat and assume the controls as her pilot deciphered the jungle maps. “You learn quickly,” she explained, “when you know if you don't, you may never get to your destination.” In-depth explorations of Greece, England, Egypt, and the United States (from coast to coast) followed, with each body of work accompanied by a major publication, a touring exhibition, and a prestigious award (including NEA and Fullbright grants and election as a Fellow of The Explorers Club). In each trip, the often uneasy coexistence of man and nature is illuminated with overhead photographs of both ancient and modern sites.
In 1990 the International Center of Photography mounted the 65-print exhibition “The Sacred & Secular” comprising highlights from each of Marilyn Bridges's journeys. This immensely popular exhibition traveled internationally for three years, and was featured by Charles Kuralt on CBS News. art2art is pleased to organize a new version of “The Sacred & Secular” and to make it available to a new generation of museumgoers. |
