JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Fall Line Press (here). Softbound book with end flaps and exposed Swiss binding, 9 x 12 inches, 136 pages, with 65 color photographs. Includes essays by Dan Chapman and the artist. Design by Megan Fowler. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Photographers have been practicing aerial camerawork for centuries, adopting a steady succession of technologies in the process. When Nadar wanted an elevated view of Paris in 1858, the best available tool was a hot air balloon. It was difficult enough to operate a camera in such a beast even without hydrogen gas contaminating the development. Nevertheless he persisted, working through bugs to create pioneering photos. Since then, inventions such as airplanes, helicopters, and rockets have greatly expanded photography’s aerial boundaries, not excepting forays into kite-mounted lenses (reviewed here, e.g.), satellite imagery, camera-tossing, and pigeon-harnessed reconnoissance.
By whatever instrument, ascension into vertical space is something of a photographic parlor trick. As with other viewing filters—say monochrome palette, underwater cameras, or plastic lenses—altitude can inject a one-step visual serum into otherwise mundane subject matter. Geographic features reduce to formalism. Spatial relationships transmogrify.The everyday language of light, perspective, texture, and landmarks is translated through a new vantage.
These thoughts might have been in the back of Peter Essick’s mind as he taught himself aerial drone photography. He embarked on the process roughly a half dozen years ago while shooting the 65-acre Fernbank Forest in Atlanta on commission. The resulting monograph, 2020’s Fernbank Forest, offers a glimpse into his early development. While most of the book’s photos were taken at ground level, a portion were shot with an airborne drone (a quad-propeller DJI, for anyone curious), offering views of and through the forest canopy. Essick’s craft was typically 50 to 80 feet off the ground, high enough for an altered perspective, but still low enough to maintain a certain familiarity with the subject matter. Tree trunks, branches, and leaves were recognizable as such, even if they were curiously distorted.
Drone photography was in its relative infancy in this period (the late 2010s). Essick’s learning curve has roughly coincided with subsequent innovations, as the field has exploded in accessibility and popularity (full disclosure: my son is a professional drone pilot). Advanced instruments have now filtered well into the consumer market, and most models come equipped with high end digital cameras. For aspiring photographers, they can offer a degree of three dimensional precision, technical quality, and affordability which was previously unavailable. Not only have we come a long way from hot air balloons. Even airplanes and helicopters begin to feel antiquated.
That said, for whatever reason, drone adoption in the fine art photo world has been sporadic to date. Stephen Shore is probably the most prominent fine art drone photographer (many examples are collected in his 2023 book Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape). Peter Essick is right on his heels. His recent monograph Work In Progress was shot entirely with drones. With sixty-five pictures created mostly during the pandemic, it represents a step forward for this nascent technology, both personally and for the field generally.
As with Fernbank Forest, the general location for Work In Progress is Essick’s hometown of Atlanta. But the focus has now moved from forest to construction sites, and the style has been honed accordingly. “At a new site,” Essick explains his process, “I first fly up to high altitude and look in all directions. Like in traditional photography, I look for a scene that draws me in. Sometimes it is the color, but often it is the graphic nature of a section of the construction. I like to think of construction sites as fast changing landscapes. Often it is the grading or movement of the soil that creates the painterly appearance. A half-built structure often can look more abstract than a finished building.”
If Atlanta’s housing boom lends itself to abstraction, Essick heightens the effect (no pun intended) with vertical perspectives. The oblong vantages of Fernbank Forest have largely given way to shots aimed directly downward. Aiming at the center of the earth from omniscient heights, Essick’s camera flattens multistory sites into 2D mosaics. Balloon framed stud walls, for example, morph into shadowed striations (Essick shoots primarily at golden hour), while graveled yards and roads become speckled fields of color. A scene with two blue waste pits penned inside of yellow and red fencing hews closer to Rothko than Misrach, and a grid of oddly painted plywood boards resembles a De Stijl painting more than a housing development.
The higher the viewpoint the more painterly the impression, as shown in several large swaths of mud flows and debris spills. Small dirt clods could be brush strokes, and tire tracks finger smudges. All images in the book are printed full-bleed, one per spread, with no border marks, DOF, or other photographic effects to evidence their optical lineage. Indeed the entire project takes more inspiration from abstract expressionism than documentary photography. Think Kandinsky and Diebenkorn, not Lewis Baltz.
Of course Essick isn’t the first to explore the abstracting effects of aerial viewpoints. Many predecessors have paved the way, shooting mostly from airplanes and helicopters. We’ve discussed the work of Terry Evans (here), Christoph Gielen (here), David Maisel (here), William Garnett (here), and Julian Faulhaber (here). To this list we might add Marylin Bridges, George Steinmetz, and Emmet Gowin, to name just a handful. Most were photographing in monochrome from inside clunky aircrafts, fighting engine vibration, speed, and flight gear. Essick’s technique seems clinical and controlled in comparison. The observer’s screws have tightened, even as he’s removed himself from the locus of exposure. His book sequences one exacting frame after another. Each picture extends to the paginal horizon, a rectangle of space perpendicular to the reader.
But Work In Progress is not intended merely for aesthetic pleasures. It’s a cultural critique as well. Atlanta is the least densely populated major city in the U.S., and also one of the fastest expanding. “An hour north of downtown and you’re still fighting traffic and counting warehouses,” grumbles Dan Chapman in the afterword, “while marveling at the sylvan sounding names of subdivisions offering five-story homes on quarter-acre lots.”
For Essick too, sprawl is a waking reality. “In my neighborhood in Atlanta,” he notes, “construction activity is an everyday occurrence.” But Essick’s displeasure is more restrained than Chapman. His bird’s eye view seems detached and dispassionate, at least initially. But look closer and one notices a faintly dystopian edge to his photos, as Essick relishes unearthly ochres, exposed earth, and discarded supplies. Toto, we are not in Fernbank anymore. Instead we’re in the neighborhood of Edward Burtynsky and Richard Mosse.
As with clarion calls from those two, Work In Progress is intended as an environmental polemic, a sort of Lorax for the gallery set. Perhaps if the right audience or city council member or sufficient readership sees the book, it could trigger a sustainable turn for Atlanta? Personally I wouldn’t hold your breath, but Chapman is more hopeful. “The future doesn’t have to be another destructive chapter,” he writes. “It’s up to us to find beauty in progress.” And not a moment too soon, because his essay paints a damning portrait of present trends. “Atlanta,” he warns, “can grow to the horizon.” By 2060, he forecasts, 23 million acres of trees will be lost to development in the U.S. South, and 18 percent of the region will be covered by concrete. Yikes.
Chapman ruminates on spaghetti junctions and megacities. It’s not a pretty picture, even if viewed from 300 feet above. I’ll spare the ugly details, but I will confirm his claim that ants and slime molds are better able to optimize growth than humans. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell,” wrote Edward Abbey, and he wasn’t kidding. But not all is lost. Fly high enough (on wax wings?) and people appear ant-like, while developments resemble slime molds. These tiny creatures may hold the moral high ground for now. But humans still have the edge when it comes to photography, art, and drone technology. Work In Progress is a case in point.
Collector’s POV: Peter Essick does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely follow up directly with the artist via his website (linked in the sidebar.)
