The earliest surviving aerial photograph was taken from a hot air balloon in 1860 by daguerreotype studio technician James Black. Titled “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It,” by poet and professor of medicine Oliver Wendell, the albumen silver print depicts characteristic landmarks of the city—Old South Meeting House, Trinity Church—around the intersection of Washington and Milk streets. Wendell’s ornithic designation rhetorically replaces the camera aperture with the bird’s eye. By immediately ascribing an aviary point of view, this artifact locates the origin of earth imaging within a trans species desire: for observation as method to surpass the human sensorium. The “bird’s-eye view” betrays a deeply embedded fantasy of escaping the partial and specific human perspective. However, this predisposition also reveals our inability to comprehend the visual construction of information beyond an anthropogenic paradigm. Eagles have the sharpest vision in the animal kingdom, yet the angle of their eye sockets and lack of ocular muscle directs their vision outwards. Through a bifurcated view directed perpendicularly from either side of their beak, they can never see what is straight in front. This anatomy reorients the human correlation between vision and chronology such that “looking” becomes a practice of gathering the pieces left behind. For an eagle in flight, sight is not predictive; it’s a gradual pattern recognition rather than a forewarning. Yet, as the first elevated photograph reveals, our notions of how other species perceive the world are limited by our own sensory apparatus.

Following in the lineage of Black, The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, published in September 1986, includes a review by Stewart Brand of pioneering aerial photographer Georg Gerstr’s contemporaneous book, Below from Above. The entry is embedded within a larger section on “whole earth systems,” which includes information on different imaging tools such as satellites, telescopes, and various cartographic methods. Brand writes, “understanding whole systems means looking both larger and smaller than where our daily habits live and seeing clear through our cycles. The idea of self—the thing to be kept alive—expands from the individual human to the whole Earth.” The chapter includes a slew of additional products used to observe and maintain whole earth systems (atlases, EOSAT/Landsat prints, interpretive guidebooks), which Catalog editors valued for their ability to make the outer-planetary familiar and the Earth strange; reveal the percentage of daily goings on that are imperceptible to our five senses; and identify previously unknown plant and rock species through newly measurable characteristics. Earth imaging, as communicated in the Catalog, seems to imply the necessity of an oscillation between knowing and unknowing, particularly in regard to situating the individual human “self.” Through an ability to exit habituated perspectives, these imaging techniques were deemed useful to cultivating a new orientation of ourselves within the larger cosmos. In a subsection on constellations, Brand includes a quote from the book Star Swirls by Robinson Jeffers: “There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man. His stupid dreams and red rooster importance: let him count the star swirls.” Again, a specific species of bird is invoked for its presumed traits—here, a sense of self certainty and unwavering assuredness—in relationship to the human predilection towards gaining an aerial view.

Below from Above comprises 40 juxtaposed image pairs, captured by Gerstr, of  “pristine wilderness,” farmlands, and urban environments. Brand describes the book’s collection of images as a “yield of perspective,” affording the reader-flier the inability to not try things differently. This sentiment speaks to a particular function of photographic capture: to physically and/or ideologically reconfigure the geographic space that it reproduces. As such, the book gained a reputation for convincing large agricultural operations to focus on safeguarding practices against soil erosion through a rhetoricization of aesthetic beauty. For example, farmers in the Southern United States were mobilized to practice more robust cover-cropping after exposure to an image of a field in Wichita, Kansas, with an unusual pattern tilled into the soil’s surface crust. A surprising wind storm had required the creative cultivation method of a spring-tooth harrow driven in haphazard squiggles in order to save on fuel consumption and time while still covering the largest land area. In another case, the Malian village of Labbezanga on an island in the Niger River gained the international reputation of “most beautiful village in Africa” after “granaries that wind through the village like strings of beads” were patternized under Gerstr’s aerial lens. According to cyberneticists, the village’s spatial planning exemplified a functioning interconnected system, to which Brand responded, “for the unassuming Labbezangans, [this is] almost too much praise.” This remark points to a larger colonial fetishization undergirding Gerstr’s domineering collection and the Whole Earth Catalog at large: the assumed unequivalent availability of landscapes in the Global South to be stripped of their context and reduced to a language of graphic appeal. A differing susceptibility to the power of cinematic reshaping, which itself is highly dependent on the socio-political developments in technology espoused in this chapter of the Catalog, as only a specific combination of aircraft model and camera body are capable of achieving the specifications required of aerial photography.

Limited by these hegemonic frameworks, Gerstr was abstractly concerned with the photographic potential for critical reevaluation, writing in the book’s preface, “Habit covers the world around us like varnish. There is nothing more invisible than a monument in a public square. Concealed in every serious photographic endeavor is the attempt to scratch off or at least scratch at this patina.” Such spatial deterritorialization was emphasized in the book’s layout: a series of contrapuntal diptychs across the codex that induced humorous or ironic contrast between patterns in the landscape. Fish traps, canyon mines, a stadium crowd, salt pans, a magma lake. Achieving this effect through aerial photography—a new typology of image production able to carefully oscillate between abstraction and representation—required a complete perpendicular view of the Earth’s surface. For Gerstr, only this angle “exhaustively deals with the potential of elevation” such that the resulting image both alienates and concentrates—a visual threshold perhaps particularly susceptible to ideological interjection. The geese invoked by the prototypical glass negative completely efface this concern. Their ocular anatomy enables a panoramic view, simultaneously overlapping both oblique and lateral vision at all times. Hence, the title of the first aerial photograph begins to suggest a reductive stand-in for the perception of more-than-human beings, or an inability to consider the materially divergent perspective an animal’s “sight” (if we can include this perception under the same semiotic category) might produce.

Queer ecological theorist Donna Haraway aligns the view from above with an effort to enact a “god trick”: to presume a bird’s-eye view in order to dodge the claims of subjectivity afforded to a situated perspective. While an invaluable contribution to refuting objectivity-relativism—a singular, non-subjugated personhood granted the ability to speak from “nowhere”—implicitly articulating the aerial perspective as inherently disembodied reinforces a singular species metric of perception. What happens when we consider the perspective of the literal bird evoked as an abstract referent through Haraway’s argument against the view from above? For the eagle or the geese, the ability to “see” ultraviolet wavelengths renders their physical surroundings differently than the human eye does. Fur reveals symbols within its tufts. The color spectrum expands twofold. Differentiation between physical entities is entirely impacted by these ocular specifications. In this sense, not only the perceiving subject, but also their perceived surroundings, are marked as subjective entities. However, their mutability need not undermine their claim to truthfulness.

Inversely, the literal animal body has been historically mobilized as a primary agent of a global surveillance-capture matrix. The first aerial camera was the pigeon. In 1908, a German apothecary patented a method for attaching a small lens to a homing pigeon’s breast, marking the start of what we now understand as drone technology—a sentient replacement for their kite and balloon predecessors. In more recent years, the CIA considered returning to this technology to remedy the long-range problem induced by mechanical drones.¹ However, the idea was abandoned, as pigeons proved ineffective at flying over the exact coordinates in need of surveillance and capture. Animals continue to be subject to photographic harnesses through a zoological research method known as the CritterCam. Attached with a smorgasbord of closures apt for each target species—straps, suction cups, clamps, backpacks—terrestrial CritterCams allow for constant monitoring of animal behaviour. This modular apparatus reveals a logic of folding inwards—an instance where the camera and surveilled subject are one and the same.

In 2017, members of the Faroe Islands’ tourism board became frustrated by their exclusion from Google’s comprehensive “street view” mapping effort. They devised a CritterCam-adjacent plan to attach 360-degree cameras to the backs of a herd of sheep, creating a media campaign with footage from select scenic coordinates. In one behind-the-scenes video included in the press kit, the footage slowly bobs up and down with the motion of the sheep’s hind legs and the slight, bouncy give of the wooly coat underneath the camera. The effort went viral, drawing the attention of Google Maps’ program manager. In this sequence of events, the animal body was produced as a conduit for a larger technological intervention: the Google team subsequently bringing their mapping technology to the Faroe Islands to replace the ad hoc sheep apparatus.

The inception of Google Street View was made possible by a project from the MIT Media Lab: Aspen Movie Map, a program funded as a trial of military technology for “surrogate travel,” or the ability for soldiers to familiarize themselves with alien territories before arriving in the flesh. This simulation introduces a navigable “mockup” of physical locations, allowing users to double their body, traverse two places at once. While aerial photography might appear to present more problems vis-à-vis the imposition of vertical objectivity, the aggregation of street view footage presents a similar abstraction through “datafication” of place specificity. The violent origin of this particular imaging technology further points to the contested reality of attempting to surpass situatedness through a disembodied extension of perception. On Google Sheep View, however, the non-human interjection provides a distinctive punctum to the image—the woolen whisps always visible along the x-axis, the slight tilt as the sheep’s body adjusts to uneven terrain, the other sheep in the herd wandering alongside its lone documentarian. In the majority of street view footage, the vehicle of capture—bikes, cars, vans—are blurred out, or additional footage is superimposed on top to give the illusion of a disembodied perspective. Drag to face downward at your own doubled and displaced body, and you are met with blurry concrete. On Sheep View, the positioning of the lens in relation to the sheep loin and shoulder makes floating through the virtual simulacrum near impossible. The micro-solar array powering the apparatus is always visible, laying flush with the sheep’s back. The dual camera setup deployed to enable DIY 360 degree footage even allows for a glance at the recording lens itself.

While Sheep View still exists within the parameters of a projected human fantasy, unlike the “god trick” proposition of Below From Above, it is undeniably a view from somewhere—the lens is tied firmly to the ground. Clicking and lurching through the Faroesian coast, it’s difficult to avoid asking oneself the question: what should the aim of attempting to inhabit a non-human perspective be? The legacy of earth imaging technologies—and their co-option of both figurative and physical animal bodies—suggests that instead of surpassing limits of the human (seeing how a bird sees), this pursuit might be best enacted as an acknowledgment of these very constraints. Underlining the human perspective as partial and specific rejects the notion that our sensorium produces a singular or neutral image of the world. Instead of efforts to produce accurate information, attempts at trans species imagining can be understood as implausible exercises—efforts that, nonetheless, hold potential for empathy in the endeavour to extend past oneself. Rather than an absolute ascension towards the sky, as Gerstr proposes, perhaps this speculative movement requires an attention to the earthly contact of untrained appendages.