INTERROGATING THE LANDSCAPE

Cris Benton

Aerial panorama of Rodeo Valley in the Marin Headlands

just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

For twenty years I have been taking low- level aerial photographs using cameras lofted by kites. Considering the abundant buzz about drones these days, kite aerial photography (KAP) might seem a bit anachronistic. Indeed, kites were used for aerial photography long before the airplane was invented. However old, they remain a very practical platform for aerial photography in the current day. As my work in kite aerial photography matured, the technique led to topics, relationships, and communities that have been richly rewarding. So much so that KAP is now my primary creative pursuit, offering the joys and challenges of an emerging career.

My current work with KAP is focused on the investigation of specific landscapes. I am using kites as a means of exploring the natural and cultural geographies of places like the South San Francisco Bay salt ponds and the multilayered coastal defense works

that once protected the Golden Gate Strait. Taking aerial photographs at the intimate scale afforded by kites while simultaneously o c c u p y i n g t h e l a n d s c a p e b e i n g photographed proves to be a powerful way to learn about a place. The remainder of this article will be structured as an auto- interview addressing questions I often encounter in the field.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PROCESS FOR KITE AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY?

The idea is to take photographs from somewhere between head height and 400 feet above the ground. I keep my kites below 500 feet in deference to light aircraft. To lift the camera I use single-line kites selected for stability, often taking a quiver of six to eight kites when I head out to photograph. After watching the wind (e.g., movement in trees, flags, low clouds), I select a kite that matches the breeze. The

kite should pull enough to lift the camera but not too much more. After launching the kite, I fly it up to steady air. In urban settings that might put the kite at 200 to 300 feet above the ground. Out in open terrain you can find steady wind at 100 feet or so.

I use the following kites, ordered from low winds to high as measured on the ground, to lift a camera cradle holding the Canon Rebel T5i dSLR with a 10-22 millimeter wide-angle lens [rig weight is 3 lb. 8-1/2 oz. (1.6 kg.)]:

A Peter Bults Maxi-Dopero (4-10 mph) 8.5-foot Rokkaku (6-12 mph)

7.2-foot Rokkaku (8-14 mph)

6.0-foot Rokakku (10-16 mph)

Sutton Flowform 30 (10-16 mph)

Sutton Flowform 16 (13-19 mph)

Sutton Flowform 8 (18-25 mph)

After the kite reaches steady air, I fly it for about ten minutes to establish that the wind is reliable and the kite is performing well. And then, a hundred feet or more below the kite, I attach a little string and pulley suspension called a Picavet (invented by Frenchman Pierre Picavet in 1912). This device has a cross with pulleys in each corner. Lines run through the Picavet’s pulleys to clip onto the kite line in two places. Below the Picavet cross you attach the camera, which is held in a small robotic cradle – basically a double U-bracket with radio and servomotors. Controlled by a handheld radio transmitter, the airborne cradle can point the camera in any compass direction, tilt it from straight down to the horizon, and with the flip of a switch change from portrait to landscape format. The radio also fires the camera when you want to take the photograph.

Once the equipment is attached to the kite line, you let out more line, the kite flies higher and pulls the camera cradle up after

it. With the camera aloft you can walk around to position the camera in absolute space. In the South Bay I have hiked five miles along the levees with the camera aloft, taking photographs as I go. I frame each photograph by watching the camera, imagining what it would “see” and using the radio to frame the shot by panning and tilting. After the shot is composed, I wait for the camera to be still and then press the shutter button to make the exposure. It only takes a few seconds per image and it’s great fun.

YOU’VE BEEN DOING KAP SINCE 1995. THAT’S 20 YEARS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE THAT HAS KEPT YOU ENGAGED FOR THAT LONG?

I’m notorious in my family for picking up pursuits, going through the learning curve, and then discarding them rudely to bounce to the next new thing. I’ve stuck with kite photography because it’s a challenging blend of many different activities. There’s definitely an aspect of invention to it. In building apparatus from scratch – camera cradles, electronics, and various control devices – I spend many an enjoyable hour tinkering at the workbench. And then there’s the whole aspect of kites and becoming proficient at flying them. I now sew a variety of kites on an old 1938 Singer Featherweight sewing machine, so there’s the joy of creating elegant and sturdy flying contraptions. The tactile experience of tuning and flying a kite is quite satisfying.

Once the gear is in order, kite aerial photography is a great excuse to get outdoors. Over the last decade I have been out on average once a week to hike and photograph. These have been wonderful explorations of the Bay Area and beyond. There’s also a social dimension to KAP. Kite aerial photography easily trumps babies or puppies as inducement for perfect strangers

continued on page 32

Radio-controlled camera cradle built for the Canon T5i dSLR.

Cris Benton

LEFT: A hand-sewn, 7.2-foot Rokkaku kite. RIGHT: The author’s Singer Featherweight.

to start a conversation. I enjoy these exchanges.

Then there’s this notion of composing images without being at the camera. I have started calling it “interrogating the landscape.” One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is: “Can I see what the camera sees?” I can see a real time image by transmitting video down to an electronic viewfinder. Being gadget-prone, I’ve had fun making wireless systems to serve as electronic viewfinders, but I found that I rarely used them. In large part this is because I really enjoy watching the camera, imagining being there, thinking about the field of view the camera enjoys from 100 feet or 200 feet above the earth. As I compose the image in absentia, it involves forming a visual hypothesis. Later, when I get the photograph back, I compare my mind’s eye view with what the camera captured. In doing so I learn an enormous amount. Why are the relationships between these trees different than what I imagined? Good heavens, look at the old marsh channels that are evident in the bottom of this salt pond. And here are a myriad of little animal trails crisscrossing a hillside that I would have described as having a uniform ground cover.

HOW HAS YOUR WORK PROGRESSED IN KITE AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY (KAP)?

My first forays into KAP sprang from the confluence of longstanding interests in p h o t o g ra p hy a n d ra d io – co n t r o l le d sailplanes. In 1995, after playing with mounting a camera on one of my planes, I made a shift to kites, which tend to be stable, self-tending platforms. I started off largely innocent in the ways of kites and rapidly grew to appreciate their charms. Like the best efforts of my architectural colleagues, kites offered a balanced blend of firmness, commodity, and delight. Since

switching to kites as an aerial platform, I have progressed through three photographic stages.

The first stage, lasting several years, involved sorting out how to fly kites, mount the camera, compose the photographs, and keep my lofted gear from crashing. I have now designed a dozen camera cradles, including one that became the cover story for the inaugural issue of MAKE magazine. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum exhibited this cradle and twenty aerial images when it included MAKE in the 2006 National Design Triennial exhibit.

During my middle period, again lasting several years, I travelled broadly with my KAP gear in a quest for aerial images compositionally worthy of display. This was a fine period of honing technique and skill that yielded satisfying work, the placement of images in publications, coverage in the press, and a few exhibits. During a sabbatical year in 2003, I was fortunate to spend time as an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and as an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in California, both formative experiences.

I am now well settled into my third period, the use of kite aerial photography in sustained studies of specific landscapes. The best example is my project examining the South Bay salt pond landscape. I came across the salt ponds while taking a series of hikes with microbiologist Dr. Wayne Lanier during my sabbatical at the Exploratorium. On these hikes Wayne would photograph through his field microscope while I took o v e r h e a d v i e w s o f t h e s a m p l e d environment. Not knowing much about the South Bay, I was struck by the otherworldly colors and textures present in what was once marshland. This was fun territory to photograph. After learning more about the

continued on page 37

Cris Benton

Photographs taken during Cris Benton’s “middle period,” scenes from three summers in Denmark.

Cris Benton

More scenes from Benton’s three summers in Denmark.

Cris Benton

Cris Benton’s aerial photographs from the South San Francisco Bay salt ponds.

Cris Benton

More scenes from the South Bay salt ponds.

current day South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, I developed a proposal to continue photographing the South Bay landscape in service of the restoration efforts. The Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife issued special use permits providing permissions conditioned on seasonal restrictions to protect wildlife. This project, still underway, has blossomed into a major undertaking.

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THIS SOUTH BAY PROJECT AND WHAT HAS IT ACCOMPLISHED?

I started by photographing the colors and textures associated with the various salinities of salt ponds in the South Bay. Curiously, you can see little of a pond’s color or bottom detail while hiking on the ground due to sky reflection from the pond’s surface. Happily, an aerial vantage point reduces surface reflection to allow pond colors and bottom detail to merge. This advantage, afforded to airline passengers landing at SFO, is also realized by a kite- lofted camera.

I was having a great time bagging new colors, as though trophy animals, when I realized that many of my aerial images contained vestigial remnants of the marsh channels that once served square miles of South Bay marsh. Looking more closely I also found traces of old boat landings, 19th century salt works, and curious patterns left by over a century of dredging and duck hunting.

What began as a photographic romp through a visually compelling landscape slowly shifted toward documenting the landscape’s history and deciphering traces of it evident in my aerial photographs. My aerial images often presented puzzling artifacts. These fueled visits to libraries, map rooms, and local experts. Then it was back

to the field for more photographs. After photographing for several years, I came to appreciate that the landscape was still in transition, and rapid transition at that, as the salt pond restoration project gained stride. This realization has lent a sense of urgency to the project.

Over the last ten years I have made about 250 trips to photograph the South Bay. The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project has used my images for outreach and in support of science projects guiding the restoration. For instance, my low-level aerial images of Drawbridge were used to “ground truth” the locations of invasive vegetation as predicted by the analysis of satellite data. My photographs of the project have also been used by over three-dozen nonprofit agencies.

I have mounted several exhibits of the South Bay work including a permanent display of sixty images at the Exploratorium and large panoramas in the Oakland Museum’s recent “Above & Below: Stories from Our Changing Bay” exhibit.

My first project on retiring from University of California, Berkeley in 2012 was writing Saltscapes, a book (Heyday Books) presenting a history of the South Bay landscape as revealed through my aerial photographs.

NOW THAT YOU ARE SPENDING MORE TIME ON

KAP, WHAT’S NEXT?

My model for landscape study is strongly shaped by very positive experiences in the South Bay, a landscape with visual intrigue and a rich backstory. It has become clear that the South Bay study benefits from frequent, iterative engagement – a repeated blend of photography, research, and time spent simply experiencing the place. This

continued on page 40

Cris Benton

A sampler of the author’s early aerial photographs from defense works in the headlands.

Cris Benton

The Three Sisters, three former U.S. Army buildings,

at Ft. Barry in the Marin Headlands.

process was inspired in part by the Lake Project, David Maisel’s fine study of the Owens Valley landscape.

After retirement, with more time available for photography, I have started formulating my next project. My South Bay work is constrained during the summer months of the year by nesting season restrictions. Over the last few years I have experimented during the off-season with a couple of landscape projects in collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). These involved forays to more distant subjects – wagon train tracks along the Hastings Cutoff Trail in Utah (near Sun Tunnels) and cold war aerial resolution targets in the Mojave Desert. While these were fun, distance prevented the nuanced e n g a g e m e n t o f la n d s c a p e I h av e experienced in the South Bay. I faced similar limitations while photographing Sea Ranch for Donlyn Lyndon’s book.

So for my next major project I am considering landscapes more readily accessed from Berkeley: the headlands at the Golden Gate, the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, and Central Valley agriculture. I am particularly taken with the idea of photographing the headlands landscape and have, in fact, been taking aerial photographs of San Francisco Bay’s gun batteries since the 1990s. There is clear compositional potential in the purposeful geometries of the defense works flanked by the foil of encroaching nature. Plus, the landscape offers a compelling backstory. As my interest in the headlands grew, I made contact with historians Steve Haller and John Martini, both experts on San Francisco’s coastal defenses, and have secured permission from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to take KAP images. I have also started more serious research into the fascinating history of the defense works, a story in which multiple epochs of technology and

construction have left their mark on the landscape.

My work in the headlands involves new challenges in kite flying. The winds encountered over the salt ponds are steady as can be. There, my elegant, quiet kites can carry my camera aloft for hours at a time with relatively little attention to the kite. This a l lows me to concentrate on the photography. The headlands, on the other hand, sport an exuberant topography of steep coastal hills and sheer bluffs. These produce complex and variable winds with large scale eddies that can expose kite and camera cradle to gusts and lulls that definitely command your attention. There are days when one moment your gear is straining at the upper end of its wind range and in the next you have the camera in near free fall. I am now gravitating toward smaller, framed kites and developing an interest in small deltas. This is a fine, new puzzle to solve and I am enjoying the challenge. ◆

Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton (Heydey Books) can be found on Amazon.com or at your favorite local bookstore.

YOSHIZUMI-SAN: