Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime From Above

Description

From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England's surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery's importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above. Cover ......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments ......Page 10 Introduction: Aerial Aftermaths ......Page 16 1. Surveying Wartime Aftermaths: The First Military Survey of Scotland ......Page 49 2. Balloon Geography: The Emotion of Motion in Aerostatic Wartime ......Page 83 3. La Nature à Coup d’Oeil: “Seeing All” in Early Panoramas ......Page 119 4. Mapping “Mesopotamia”: The Emergence of Aerial Photography in Early Twentieth-Century Iraq ......Page 169 5. The Politics of the Sensible: Aerial Photography’s Wartime Aftermaths ......Page 211 Afterword: Sensing Distance ......Page 238 Notes ......Page 248 Works Cited ......Page 286 A ......Page 308 B ......Page 310 C ......Page 311 D ......Page 312 E ......Page 313 F ......Page 314 H ......Page 315 I ......Page 316 L ......Page 317 M ......Page 318 N ......Page 320 P ......Page 321 R ......Page 323 S ......Page 324 T ......Page 326 V ......Page 327 W ......Page 328 Z ......Page 329 Color Plates ......Page 153