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Aerial Photography · Malta
</div>
<h1>Malta,<br>Without<br>the People</h1>
<p class="hero-subtitle">
An exploration of altitude, abstraction, geometry and the strange
peace discovered when an island is viewed from far enough above
the noise of everyday life.
</p>
<div class="hero-meta">
<span>Essay</span>
<span>Photography</span>
<span>Art & Landscape</span>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<main>
<article class="article">
<p>
There is, I have discovered, a certain elevation at which the island
of Malta undergoes a transformation so complete that one might suppose
some benevolent spirit had intervened between the earth and the heavens
and quietly removed from the scene all that which is noisy, hurried,
disagreeable and needlessly human. I did not discover this by any grand
philosophical experiment, but by sending a small mechanical contrivance
upward into the blue, carrying with it a camera and the rather impertinent
ambition of seeing what the eye, imprisoned upon the ground, is seldom
permitted to see. As the machine ascends, the roads become threads, the
houses diminish into marks, the traffic resolves itself into minute and
harmless motions, and at last the island seems to surrender its clamour
altogether.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
One hears nothing.<br>
<span>One sees everything.</span>
</div>
<p>
This, curiously enough, is not a virtue proclaimed in the catalogues of
those who manufacture such flying apparatus. They speak instead of
endurance, engines, obstacle avoidance, lenses and the astonishing
multiplication of little squares called pixels, as though the principal
object of invention were to persuade mankind that a machine is clever
because it can count. Yet the true wonder, to my mind, lies elsewhere.
From the earth Malta is a place of perpetual activity: carts and motorcars,
buses and builders, scaffolding, limestone, dust, deliveries, tourists,
inhabitants, walls, rubbish and those peculiar assemblies of human beings
who, having selected the very centre of the road, appear suddenly to have
discovered an urgent matter of philosophy which must be debated before
anybody is allowed to proceed.
</p>
<p>
Then the machine rises, and the whole argument changes. What was a road
becomes a line; what was a wall becomes a border; what was a field becomes
a panel of colour; what was a salt pan becomes a piece of geometry of such
composure that one suspects it has been attending lessons in the decorative
arts. The island, relieved of its familiar explanations, begins to resemble
a vast composition laid out by some prodigiously gifted draughtsman. It is
as though Malta had been patiently composing itself for several thousand
years, while mankind arrived at the last possible moment with scaffolding,
a skip and an inexplicable determination to park a van across the finished
work.
</p>
<div class="section-break"><i></i></div>
<p>
This is the peculiar privilege of looking from above: the landscape does
not become beautiful because I have photographed it; rather, I have removed
just enough of the circumstances by which we ordinarily identify and judge
a place to permit its latent beauty to declare itself. The field is no
longer obliged to be a field, nor the road to serve the motorcar, nor the
wall to keep one thing apart from another. Their purposes recede and their
forms remain. A circular structure may become a diagram; an agricultural
boundary may assume the character of ornament; a patch of cultivated earth
may present itself as an abstract painting, although somewhere beneath the
abstraction there remains a farmer who would doubtless be astonished to
learn that his potatoes have entered the realm of fine art.
</p>
<p>
I generally turn the camera almost directly toward the earth, allowing the
gimbal to surrender the horizon. It is a small technical decision with
rather large consequences. The horizon is one of the great tyrants of
visual understanding: it tells us where we are, perspective tells us what
is near and far, and context informs us what we are supposed to think about
the thing before us. Remove these authorities and the eye becomes wonderfully
uncertain. Scale loses its confidence. Perspective becomes a suggestion
rather than a command. Function withdraws. Form, which has been waiting
patiently beneath all this practical information, steps forward.
</p>
<div class="highlight">
<p>
Remove context, and the eye becomes wonderfully uncertain.
Scale loses its confidence. Perspective becomes a suggestion
rather than a command. Function withdraws. Form steps forward.
</p>
</div>
<p>
It was in this manner that I began to recognise the peculiar affinity
between Malta and the language of Art Deco. I had not set out to decorate
the island, nor did I wish to impose some fashionable vocabulary upon it.
The geometry was already there. Malta possesses an extraordinary abundance
of repeated forms, hard divisions, terraces, curves, rectangles, circular
structures, agricultural grids, pale stone and emphatic fields of colour.
Seen from the ground, these things are absorbed into the business of daily
life; seen from above, they become almost theatrical in their arrangement.
One begins to wonder whether the island has always known precisely what it
was doing and whether we, below, have merely been too occupied to notice.
</p>
<p>
Naturally, the apparatus is not so obliging as to create art merely because
I have decided to look for it. There remains the exposure, the shutter, the
ISO, the stability of the camera, the composition and the perpetual necessity
of preserving sufficient information in the RAW capture for the later work.
The wind, meanwhile, remains entirely unmoved by artistic intention. It has
no sympathy for composition. The battery possesses even less. There is
something faintly ridiculous in standing upon the earth, watching a machine
several hundred metres away while making the smallest of adjustments upon
a screen, as though one were conducting an experiment of great scientific
importance rather than attempting to persuade a flying collection of motors
and electronics to bring home a decent photograph.
</p>
<p>
Light, however, is a more gracious collaborator. In the early morning and
towards evening, when the sun approaches the earth at a lower angle, shadows
lengthen and the surfaces of Malta begin to reveal their character.
Limestone acquires depth; furrows declare themselves; salt deposits glimmer
upon the surface; water gathers the sky into its own body; colours separate
and become distinct. What was flat becomes articulated. What was merely
visible becomes almost palpable. One may look upon the photograph and feel,
with some strange conviction, that the hand could enter the frame and discover
beneath its fingertips the roughness of limestone, the dryness of soil, the
crystalline residue of salt and the ridges left by cultivation.
</p>
<p>
Malta possesses a palette of remarkable severity and tenderness at once:
the pale cream of limestone, the ochres and rusts of earth, the profound
blue of the surrounding sea, and the scattered green which survives the
summer with the stubbornness of a creature that has refused to read the
instructions. From above, these colours lie beside one another with an
almost architectural discipline. None needs to shout. The composition has
already arranged the argument.
</p>
<div class="section-break"><i></i></div>
<p>
At this point the aerial photograph ceases to be an end in itself and
becomes something more akin to evidence — the first record of an idea not
yet fully formed. I bring the RAW image into Photoshop and begin dismantling
it: selecting, masking, layering, adjusting tone and colour, compositing,
drawing, extracting, repeating and reassembling. I introduce textures from
photographs I have made myself, alter relationships between forms and
sometimes stretch a shape beyond its natural allegiance to the landscape.
The purpose is not to conceal Malta, but to discover how far the visual
truth of Malta may be extended before it ceases to be recognisably itself.
</p>
<p>
I work with a graphic tablet because I want the hand to remain somewhere
within the machine. There is a curious difference between choosing an
instruction from a menu and drawing a line with the body, even when both
ultimately result in the same procession of obedient pixels upon a screen.
Perhaps this is one of the small absurdities of our age: that we may spend
an afternoon attempting to make a digital image feel handmade, after
spending the morning congratulating ourselves upon the invention of
machines which need no hand at all.
</p>
<p>
Texture is essential because perfection is often the enemy of truth.
Malta is not smooth. Its stone is scarred by weather; its earth is furrowed;
its walls carry stains and wounds; salt gathers, vegetation intrudes, water
reflects without consultation and every surface bears some evidence of
having endured time. A perfectly clean digital surface would therefore be
an impoverishment. I want the image to possess something that may be felt
as well as seen — a resistance, a grain, a physical memory. Even when the
photograph has crossed into abstraction, the material world should remain
somewhere beneath the paint.
</p>
<p>
This is perhaps where my earlier work beneath the sea meets the work above
the island. For years I photographed minute marine life at extreme
magnification, sometimes subjects no larger than a few millimetres, and
learned that the familiar may be made strange simply by removing the
visual information upon which recognition depends. Underwater, I went
closer; now, with the drone, I go higher. The directions are opposite,
yet the discovery is strangely similar. One removes scale; the other
removes context. In both cases, the ordinary world is interrupted, and
in that interruption the imagination finds room to enter.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
Underwater, I went closer.<br>
Now, with the drone, <span>I go higher.</span>
</div>
<p>
I am particularly interested in the instant at which recognition falters.
I want the viewer to know Malta and, in the same moment, doubt it. A field
becomes an architectural panel; agricultural boundaries begin to resemble
decorative elevations; a salt pan behaves like a constructed graphic surface;
the landscape acquires the stillness and authority of an object designed
rather than a place merely inhabited. Yet beneath the manipulation there
remains the factual presence of earth, stone, water and light. The image
has not ceased to be real. It has simply ceased to behave.
</p>
<p>
And then there is the reason that is perhaps least theoretical and most
important. From a sufficient height, Malta becomes extraordinarily peaceful.
The traffic is reduced to movement. The rubbish loses its prominence.
The rushing becomes invisible. The innumerable human occupations; travelling,
parking, purchasing, delivering, repairing, building, overtaking, arguing
and explaining; dissolve into the distance. The island is released, if only
for a few moments, from the enormous burden of having to accommodate us.
</p>
<div class="highlight">
<p>
No traffic. No shouting. No rubbish. No rushing. No queues.
No quarrel about parking. No impatient horn announcing that
civilisation has reached its final hour.
</p>
</div>
<p>
Only stone, earth, water, colour, texture, light and geometry. It is
difficult to describe the peculiar peace of this. One is not merely seeing
Malta from another position; one is seeing it without the incessant
commentary which accompanies Malta at ground level.
</p>
<p>
From there, the island becomes beautiful in a manner that has little to do
with the polished beauty of the postcard. It does not require a sunset
arranged for tourists, a romantic couple leaning against a parapet or a
soundtrack informing us that we are presently having an experience. It
simply exists. The road need not carry anyone. The field need not yield
anything. The wall need not defend or divide. The salt pan need not explain
its purpose. Freed from function, these things become forms, and forms are
wonderfully innocent. They ask nothing of us.
</p>
<p>
This, I suspect, is the true luxury offered by aerial photography: not
height itself, but distance from intention. The drone permits me, for a
brief interval, to forget what everything is for. The Art Deco transpositions
are merely a continuation of that discovery. I take the geometry revealed
by altitude and carry it into another visual language, allowing repetition,
proportion, colour, texture and rhythm to become more deliberate. The
photograph provides the world as found; the digital process permits me to
converse with it.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps this is why I continue to fly. I enjoy the machinery, the precision,
the small frustrations and the strange pleasure of controlling an object
that has disappeared into the sky. I enjoy the light, the geometry and the
discovery. But above all I enjoy the silence that arrives when the machine
is high enough and the island is distant enough below. From there Malta
becomes quieter, stranger and more elegant, as though it has grown tired
of our occupation of it and has retreated upstairs to recover its composure.
</p>
<div class="section-break"><i></i></div>
<p>
There is a peculiar satisfaction in discovering that the abstract image
was present all along. I did not invent the geometry; I uncovered it.
I did not manufacture the beauty; I removed some of the circumstances
which concealed it. The drone carries the camera upward, the landscape
supplies the material, the light provides the temper, and Photoshop —
having already consumed several hours of my life; is asked to perform
the impossible task of persuading the image to remember what I felt
when I first saw it.
</p>
<div class="ending">
<p>
The resulting work is therefore not quite a photograph of Malta,
nor is it wholly a construction imposed upon Malta. It is the record
of a moment in which geography becomes design, function becomes form,
distance becomes intimacy, and the familiar briefly escapes the prison
of its own name.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps that is the entire secret. One need not alter the island in
order to see it anew. One need only rise far enough above the island,
and far enough away from ourselves.
</p>
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