Photo © Charles Benton, all rights reserved

Photo © Charles Benton, all rights reserved

That’s KAPer as in a practitioner of Kite Aerial Photography (KAP), not a misspelled pickled flower bud. Yesterday the GIIF-CAMFER GeoLunch featured Charles “Cris” Benton, an architecture professor here at UC Berkeley who’s become well-known for helping to revive the lost art of taking pictures from kites. His talk was fantastic, broaching not only the fascinating DIY technical innovations he’s made in kite design and camera cradles, but also the history of KAP (and other non-plane aerial photography, like pigeons with exploding powder-charged flashes), the social impact and perception of the practice, and the artistic implications of taking landscape photos from a perspective that is not your own.

One of the most interesting comments he had on KAP was when someone asked whether he had a video feed from the camera so he could see where it was pointing from the ground. He replied that he had tried it, and that others use similar systems regularly, but he actually preferred not to have that control. In a process he calls “interrogating the landscape,” he prefers to think through where the camera’s pointing from the ground, to imagine what will be interesting from that distant perspective, and then to later see how his mental image of the landscape corresponded to the actual picture he took.

To borrow a framework from our course on Social and Organizational Issues of Information, this seems like a brilliant confluence of spontaneity and what the philosopher Jacques Ellul called technique¹. Benton is hyper-rational in the technology and scientific understanding required to capture the images, but he also embraces chance and happenstance. His images are intentional negotiations between his own technical prowess and the vagaries of nature.

I thought it was a great talk. If you ever get a chance to hear Benton speak, I highly recommend checking it out.

¹We encountered this in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, chapter 8.