Jason Weems
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816677504
- eISBN:
- 9781452953533
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677504.003.0003
- Subject:
- Art, Visual Culture
Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of aviation-empowered aerial imagery, particularly aerial photographs, on the modern “revision” of Midwestern land and identity during the interwar years. In ...
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Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of aviation-empowered aerial imagery, particularly aerial photographs, on the modern “revision” of Midwestern land and identity during the interwar years. In particular, I focus on three clusters of Midwestern aerial photographs: high-altitude instrumentalist survey views taken by the federal government as a part of New Deal land-management initiatives; narrative oblique views created by social documentary photographers of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA); and journalistic aerial views created by the era’s preeminent popular magazine, Life. In each case, these images served as both instigator and foil for newly emergent conditions of modern agricultural production and everyday life and thereby elucidate the ways that various hegemonic institutions (from the government to the mass media) employed aerial vision as a means to invent the Midwest in a new, modern aspect. At the same time, the range of responses to the photographs articulates the complex and contradictory ways that, in the eyes of skilled everyday viewers, aerial gazes both envisioned new configurations and buttressed older orders of Midwestern experience.Less
Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of aviation-empowered aerial imagery, particularly aerial photographs, on the modern “revision” of Midwestern land and identity during the interwar years. In particular, I focus on three clusters of Midwestern aerial photographs: high-altitude instrumentalist survey views taken by the federal government as a part of New Deal land-management initiatives; narrative oblique views created by social documentary photographers of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA); and journalistic aerial views created by the era’s preeminent popular magazine, Life. In each case, these images served as both instigator and foil for newly emergent conditions of modern agricultural production and everyday life and thereby elucidate the ways that various hegemonic institutions (from the government to the mass media) employed aerial vision as a means to invent the Midwest in a new, modern aspect. At the same time, the range of responses to the photographs articulates the complex and contradictory ways that, in the eyes of skilled everyday viewers, aerial gazes both envisioned new configurations and buttressed older orders of Midwestern experience.
Jason Weems
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816677504
- eISBN:
- 9781452953533
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677504.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Visual Culture
The history of the American Midwest is marked by stories of inhabitants’ struggles to envision the unbroken expanses of their home landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s these attempts to visualize ...
More
The history of the American Midwest is marked by stories of inhabitants’ struggles to envision the unbroken expanses of their home landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s these attempts to visualize the landscape intersected with another narrative—that of the airplane. After World War I, aviation gained purpose as a means of linking together the vastness of American space. It also created a new visual sensibility, opening up new vantage points from which to see the world below. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of modern aerial vision and its impact on twentieth-century American life. In particular, the project centers on visualizations of the American Midwest, a region whose undifferentiated topography and Jeffersonian gridwork of farms and small towns were pictured from the air with striking frequency during the early twentieth century. Forging a new and synthetic approach to the study of American art and visual culture, this work analyzes an array of flight-based representation that includes maps, aerial survey photography, painting, cinema, animation, and suburban architecture. The book explores the perceptual and cognitive practices of aerial vision and emphasizes their formative role in re-symbolizing the Midwestern landscape. Weems argues that the new sightlines actualized by aviation composed a new episteme of vision that enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian identity with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity.Less
The history of the American Midwest is marked by stories of inhabitants’ struggles to envision the unbroken expanses of their home landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s these attempts to visualize the landscape intersected with another narrative—that of the airplane. After World War I, aviation gained purpose as a means of linking together the vastness of American space. It also created a new visual sensibility, opening up new vantage points from which to see the world below. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of modern aerial vision and its impact on twentieth-century American life. In particular, the project centers on visualizations of the American Midwest, a region whose undifferentiated topography and Jeffersonian gridwork of farms and small towns were pictured from the air with striking frequency during the early twentieth century. Forging a new and synthetic approach to the study of American art and visual culture, this work analyzes an array of flight-based representation that includes maps, aerial survey photography, painting, cinema, animation, and suburban architecture. The book explores the perceptual and cognitive practices of aerial vision and emphasizes their formative role in re-symbolizing the Midwestern landscape. Weems argues that the new sightlines actualized by aviation composed a new episteme of vision that enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian identity with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity.
