MUSING OVER A fireplace in Avignon in 1782, the inventor Joseph-Michel Montgolfier had a brain wave. What if the force lifting the embers from the fire could somehow be controlled and used to carry heavier things, even people? It could be a way for Spanish troops to finally take the hitherto impregnable fortress of Gibraltar. Joseph and his brother Étienne immediately set to experimenting with hot air, which they believed had a special property called levity, and by late 1783 Étienne was able to ascend in the Montgolfier balloon.
Joseph’s idea for airborne assaults proved impractical. The weight and limited efficacy of munitions in the late eighteenth century, not to mention the ease with which balloons could be downed, delayed that form of combat. But his instinct was correct: human-controlled flight is now inseparable from warfare. The Wright brothers flew their fragile, shaky, and miraculous biplane at Kitty Hawk in 1903. By 1911 an Italian plane was dropping bombs on a Turkish camp in Ain Zara, Libya. War from the air: until the enemy can retaliate, it is an insuperable advantage.
If aviation and militarism had a natural kinship at the beginning of the twentieth century, they entered an uncanny union at the start of the twenty-first. Until 2004 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, as they’re popularly known, were eyes in the sky; like fantastic periscopes, they ushered in new forms of farsightedness. Then, in June of that year, an American UAV fired a missile in South Waziristan. Two children were killed, as were several adults, one of them a mujahid called Nek Muhammad. More strikes followed the next year, and by 2008 the strikes were frequent and the death toll high, in the thousands. The results of the strikes followed the pattern established from the first one: many of the people killed were innocent of wrongdoing.
In the public mind, drones had rightly come to be seen as ominous machines tracking their hapless victims, harbingers of sudden death. But drones are gaining other, no less accurate meanings. They can be any size, and they can resemble planes or helicopters, or both, or neither. Someday they could deliver our packages or even come to play a role in commuter transportation. But the key expansion in the public understanding of drones is in the realm of popular photography.
A view from a great height is irresistible. It is twinned with the ancient dream of flight. For millennia, we have imaginatively soared above our material circumstances and dramatized this desire in tales from Icarus to Superman. Things look different from way up there. What was invisible before becomes visible: how one part of the landscape relates to another, how nature and infrastructure unfold. But with the acquisition of this panoptic view comes the loss of much that could be seen at close range. The face of the beloved is but one invisible detail among many.
When the French photographer Nadar leaned out of a hot-air balloon in 1858 and made a series of images of Paris, it was the beginning of a new age. Our eyes were carried aloft. Cities began to appear in photographic portraits that echoed maps, but with all the latest and truest information included. In 1860 James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King made Boston, as the Eagle and Wild Goose See It. And in 1906 George R. Lawrence, deploying a complicated rig of kites, created enormous photographic panoramas of San Francisco right after the earthquake. Lawrence’s photographs gave the traumatized city a measure of its catastrophe. Three years later Wilbur Wright piloted the plane from which the first moving picture was shot. In the century that followed, aerial photography was used in archaeology, advertising, surveillance, and mapping. This precipitous rate of innovation also resulted in the technology that allows drones to fix their stares on those we deem enemies. And, higher up, satellites and geolocating devices have transformed our sense of the world itself.
My parents live in Lagos, Nigeria. Sometimes, when I miss them or miss home, I go to Google Maps and trace the highway that leads from Lagos Island to our family’s house in the northern part of the city. I find our street amid the complicated jumble of brown lines just east of the bus terminal. I can make out the shape of the house, the tree in front of it, the surrounding fence. I hover there, “visiting” home.
The slippage between the domestic and the threatening aspects of aerial surveillance is something the photographer Tomas van Houtryve has explored in his powerful project Blue Sky Days. The title comes from the testimony of a thirteen-year-old Pakistani boy whose grandmother was killed in a drone strike. “I no longer love blue skies,” the boy said, speaking before Congress. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” Houtryve attached a camera to a small drone and traveled around the United States, making aerial photographs of the sorts of events that have been associated with intentional or erroneous drone strikes: funerals, weddings, groups of people at play, in prayer, or during exercise. His images show Americans in the course of their daily lives, photographed from a great height, in bright sun that throws their distorted shadows far ahead of them, presenting them as unindividuated, vulnerable, and human. Houtryve makes it clear that the people in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, or Afghanistan who are killed by American drones are also just like this. With simple, vivid means, Houtryve brings the war home.
Houtryve’s work has been published in magazines and, meticulously printed in large format, displayed in galleries. But there are other photographs made by or about drones that you encounter almost solely online. Two of these projects, very different from each other in effect and intent, happen to have settled on an identical name: Dronestagram. One, hosted at the website www.dronestagr.am, invites submissions from aerial-photography enthusiasts who are using small, commercially available or homemade drones to take photos or make videos. The site runs a photography contest, sponsored in part by National Geographic, and the winning images tend to be pretty, brightly colored landscapes of the kind that might end up on calendars or in tourist brochures. Photoshopped, wide-angled, and hectically spectacular, the photos are popular, garnering thousands of likes. But mostly they lack the element of formal provocation or conceptual rupture on which memorable images depend.
The other project that shares the name Dronestagram was created a little earlier, in 2012, by the computer artist James Bridle. He scours the news media for information about drone strikes and presents those events in capsule written form, accompanying them with a Google satellite image of the location or vicinity of the strike. In Bridle’s project, which he presents on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, we see a landscape directly from above, with buildings visible in plan form, set in brown or green surroundings. These are places where people died, whether they were suspected terrorists or bystanders. The images—sober, descriptive, clinical—are undramatic and sufficient. They make explicit the continuity between reconnaissance and attack and also embed the grim promise that it’s not over. There are more strikes to come.
The two Dronestagrams, the sanguine and the melancholic, add to our ever-increasing archive of possible landscapes. Imagine all those pictures stitched together into a single image. In this ideal aerial view, neither the pervasive violence nor the sometimes cloying prettiness would be visible. Conquest and sentimentality would both be irrelevant. In other words, the image might be like the “blue marble” photograph of Earth, taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972. It is our world, serene and self-contained, seen in one glance. It is not a view that excites us into plans for bombing our enemies, for it includes us as well. It is a view that reminds us of how mighty we are, how fragile, how delicately connected, and how beautiful.