Paper short abstract:

The spectacular failures of early aerial photography reveal that, although aerial photographs are often treated as virtual maps today, making this equivalence requires fundamental transformations in ways of viewing and relating drawings and photographs.

Paper long abstract:

Today the equivalence between aerial photographs and maps appears near complete. At just a click virtual mapping software shifts from aerial photographs to maps. Archaeology, like many other disciplines, routinely reproduces this implied equivalence, using aerial photographs to produce archaeological sites as drawings that can be mapped. This paper interrupts the assumed visual equivalence between aerial photographs and maps by highlighting the work that has been necessary to allow aerial photographs to operate like virtual maps. We focus on two case studies which, although they appear ground-breaking with the benefit of hindsight, largely failed in their own time. In the first example, anthropological photographer Francis Galton developed stereoscopic vertical aerial photography, inventing stereoscopic pocket maps for travelers, which, despite the immense popularity of the stereoscope, failed to find a market. Our second example relates the tragedy of aerial photography pioneer Henry Elsdale, who unsuccessfully attempted to interest military and government cartographers in mapping from aerial photographs, a method that they believed would never catch on. These two failures allow us to analyze the varieties of difficulty involved in establishing aerial photographs as virtual maps, both on the part of map readers and map-makers. Although developments like Google Earth have made apprehending and manipulating photographs as if they were maps commonplace, this visual practice nonetheless required important changes to the ways we view and relate photographs and drawings.