Aerial perspectives are often used to strategic ends by providing the valuable survey view instrumental to military operations, while also contributing to damage assessment and potentially to accountability efforts in the aftermath of such initiatives, via before-and-after diptychs. Precision is the lauded principle of military visioning and targeting, whereas uncertainty or ambiguity is frequently a governing characteristic of aerial photographs in civilian contexts. Aerial photographs are examples of what Allan Sekula refers to as “instrumental images” (images with primarily logistical purposes), a term that sits adjacent to Harun Farocki’s “operational images” (“pictures that are part of an operation”).Footnote 1 Commenting on the instrumentality of aerial reconnaissance photographs in the context of the First World War, Sekula remarks that these images “seem to have been devoid of any rhetorical structure” so that their interpretation demanded that each photograph “be treated as an ensemble of ‘univalent,’ or indexical signs—signs that could only hold one meaning, that could only point to one object. Efficiency demanded this illusory certainty.” Given this imposed limitation of meaning, Sekula concludes, “Within the context of intelligence operations, the only ‘rational’ questions were those that addressed the photograph at an indexical level, such as ‘Is that a machine gun or a stump?’”Footnote 2
Civilian viewers of such aerial photographs removed from the context of war lack the knowledge to formulate “rational” questions (i.e., viewers who know nothing of the machine gun or the stump), and thus prompt the images to categorically shift from instrumentality to aesthetics. Through this transition, the information (the indexical signs) held within the images falls into abstraction so that viewers suffer confusion or uncertainty. In such cases, the path of least resistance is to label the image “art” and conclude that meaning is subjective.
Untrained civilian viewers of operational or instrumental images quite naturally call upon human logic to decipher meaning in aerial images. However, Sekula argues that the “mechanical coding” of instrumental images is more quickly revealed through the “logic of the factory,” where “information was not so much exchanged as directed.”Footnote 3 What cannot be seen by untrained human eyes makes for a case of what media theorist Jussi Parikka terms the “invisual,” referring to the aggregation of data not visible to human eyes that exists within a machine-machine landscape. Parikka couples the visual and invisual “to draw this continuum as a territory of transformations that concerns images and their role as aesthetic-epistemic agents.” The “invisual” can be used to understand how aerial aftermath images that capture the trace of military operations governed by precision optics seem to purposely encounter a regime of ambiguity as “war and conflict become part of the extended repertoire of media techniques of confusion, doubt, and misinformation.”Footnote 4 According to Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller, these obfuscation techniques are often paired with the deployment of “ruses, proxies, ambiguous agency, hyperbole, the operationalization of ‘mistakes’ and unattributable forces.”Footnote 5
Further influencing sense- and decision-making, says Thomas Keenan, are the “differing presentational circumstances and conditions of use” that apply to all photographs, but perhaps especially so in the case of aerial images. The ‘“indeterminacy’ of meaning,” says Keenan, does not hold in spite of the indexicality of the image but because of it: because there is a trace, an imprint, there is the possibility of interpretation, the opportunity for meaning, fiction, and therefore the ‘battleground of fictions.’”Footnote 6 Landscape (especially one imprinted with the evidence of acts of war) provides the theatrical stage for such a “battleground of fictions” in aerial photographs, and is itself vulnerable to a range of potentially competing narratives. These images therefore may participate in the “dark side” of the Western landscape tradition, which W. J. T. Mitchell argues is underpinned by the “dreamwork of Imperialism,” in which landscape is produced through “an imaginary projection of moods.”Footnote 7
This paper examines such dreamwork at the nexus of aerial views and the production of landscape in two works of contemporary art—Fait (1992) by French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber and Desert Bloom (2011–13) by American photographer Fazal Sheikh. At the crux of the investigation is the instrumentalization and challenge of ambiguity in the respective picturing of deserts, the landscape centered in both projects. In Fait, the Kuwait desert is serially photographed from above, whereas in Desert Bloom it is the Negev; in both cases traces of military and colonial violence are captured. Fait is displayed without interpretive text or specifics of place, in a grid-like pattern that respectively emphasizes an openness of narrative and insists that seriality is an essential mechanism in the project. Meanwhile the photographs in Desert Bloom are exhibited at a distance from one another, giving each site pictured a distinctiveness, and are accompanied by detailed textual information including geographic coordinates, garnered from a range of ground-level stakeholders that rivals the scale of the photographs.
In questioning the disparity of visualizing practices performed by militaries (whose traces are evident in both series) and those by the featured artists, I consider how ambiguity not only plays into the extended repertoire of media techniques listed above but has been produced in the service of empire throughout Western art historical landscape traditions. Notably, I argue that the atmospheric renderings of North African deserts by 19th-century Orientalist artists participate in the production of deserts that reflects Mitchell’s “dreamwork of Imperialism,” in which landscape “unfold[s] its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and fold[s] back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.”Footnote 8 By rendering North African deserts in a way that platforms sandstorms or atmospheric haze, Orientalist artists created a superficial static or veil that hid details of the terrestrial desert. For example, the British painter Augustus Lamplough, who frequently used a pale or pastel color palette to pictorialize deserts as windswept or with indistinct features hidden by clouds of dust, could be seen to leverage an analog invisuality, which extends the term from the technical sense that Parikka assigns it into an art historical realm (Fig. 1).
Augustus Osborne Lamplough, Armed Men Riding on Camels in the Desert during a Sand Storm, ca. 1900. Watercolor; approximately 117 x 84 cm. Source: Welcome Collection.org, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bqvrh5st.
Sophie Ristelhueber: Fait
In the fall of 1991, seven months after the end of first Gulf War, Sophie Ristelhueber traveled to Kuwait with the intent of documenting the traces of conflict left in the desert, seeing the carved trenches and depressions from aerial bombings as “wounds” inflicted on the Earth. Entitled Fait, a French word that means both “fact” and “done,” the work is a compilation of seventy-one photographs of unspecified locations in the Kuwait desert pockmarked and disfigured by bomb blasts, inscribed with trenches, and littered with the abandoned detritus of war. The series of chromogenic and silver gelatin prints that comprise Fait incorporates both aerial and ground-level shots taken from a variety of angles, ranging from perpendicular to oblique to the more conventional horizontally framed landscapes.Footnote 9 The range of perspectives from which the photographs have been taken causes a confusion of scale, because viewers are unable to discern between images taken from, for example, 100 feet or 10 inches above the ground (Figs. 2, 3).
Sophie Ristelheuber, Untitled from the Series Fait, 1992. Chromogenic color print (1/3), framed: 39 3/4 x 49 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches (100.97 x 125.73 x 5.72 cm). From Buffalo AKG Art Museum, George B. and Jenny R. Mathews Fund, 1997, P1997:9.4. © Estate of Sophie Ristelhueber/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Source: https://buffaloakg.org/art/collection/search-collection/obtaining-and-using-images.
Installation view of Fait by Sophie Ristelhueber, New Room of Contemporary Art at Buffalo AKG Art Museum (4 April 1998–7 June 1998). Photograph by Tom Loonan. Source: https://buffaloakg.org/art/exhibitions/new-room-contemporary-art-sophie-ristelhueber.
Ristelhueber’s choice of aerial perspectives to survey the effects of the Gulf War fittingly reflects the dominant vantage point from which its second and final phase, known as Operation Desert Storm (17 January to 28 February 1991), was waged.Footnote 10 The foregrounding of aerial warfare, which depended on satellite-based navigation and electro-optically guided systems, according to military historians Richard Hallion and Adam Tooby, marked the operation as “the first time in military history in which air power was the lead force … in the strategy and execution of a war.” Hallion and Tooby noted that this novel strategy heralded “a new era: routine precise, discrete, simultaneous, parallel, and diffuse attack from above” and “highlighted the value of precision—in operations, in location, in targeting.”Footnote 11
It is curious how the aerial precision that was lauded by American military analysts for producing relatively “mercifully low casualties to both attacker and defender,” and was responsible for inflicting the terrestrial “wounds” made subject in Fait, then meets an apparently intentional regime of abstraction or confusion in documenting its aftermath. According to Ristelhueber, one mandate of the work was to comment on the limits of public comprehension despite an abundance of visioning and communication technologies, as she offers that “we see everything with satellites or all the technical data we have now, and in a way, we see nothing.”Footnote 12
It could be said that Ristelhueber is pointing to a politics of vision that divides precise military targeting from the uncertainty that defines civilian witnessing via publicly accessible aerial photographs taken during and shortly after the first Gulf War, which depended heavily on “official” interpretation by governments and media. She also was identifying, while at the same time contributing to, the “repertoire of media techniques of confusion, doubt, and misinformation” earlier mentioned by Parikka. These qualities were easily fostered at the initial edge of a burgeoning aerial visual culture at the end of the 20th century, prior to the public release of Google Earth in 2005, which was instrumental in normalizing aerial views of landscape. Before this paradigm shift when aerial imagery became increasingly ubiquitous, the general population was easily convinced that interpreting aerial images was beyond the layperson’s grasp.Footnote 13 Ristelhueber’s claim then that “we see nothing” is reflective of the as yet underdeveloped popular technovisual aerial language necessary to read these novel operational images, which were just beginning to proliferate in public media and until then had almost solely existed as technical documents in specific spheres such as the military.
Inspired by the strangeness of an aerial photograph showing the impact of French bombs on the Kuwait desert in the February 25, 1991 issue of Time magazine,Footnote 14 Ristelhueber undertook the aerial project that would become Fait. The ambitious undertaking brought her to Kuwait, and involved contracting airplanes and desert guides for the purpose of putting into form “this desert that was no longer one, that was no longer, that was filled by war.”Footnote 15 The phrasing of the artist’s intention motivated by her perception of the desert transformed by a quality of fullness carries unconscious vestiges of what Samia Henni refers to as “colonial platitudes” girded by “industrialized subjectivities and exploitative authorities [that] are constantly searching for and in need of so-called ‘empty’ places to be ‘filled’ through occupation, extraction, mining, production, accumulation,” and, in the case of Fait, war.Footnote 16 The result was a body of work based on preconceived ideas, or what Ristelhueber often referred to as “obsessions,” about the region’s iconic desert landscape, which primarily understood the desert as “empty,” a misleading and enduring conceptualization that according to Henni, “has served to legitimize its transformation, manipulation, toxification, and destruction.”Footnote 17
Ristelhueber’s activation of the desert as an empty space, which uses ambiguity as a primary aesthetic strategy, shares distinct similarities with 19th-century Orientalism, a period that gave representation to the colonial platitudes observed by Henni in works of art and literature. During that period, portraiture was used more prolifically than landscapes to pictorialize imperialist attitudes, with desert scenes often rendered in a vague and antidramatic fashion, contrary to highly detailed figurative works. Although figurative artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix in their attentiveness to realism drew upon what the art historian Linda Nochlin refers to as “an iconic distillation of the Westerner’s notion of the Oriental couched in a language of naturalism,” certain 19th-century French painters, including Gustave Guillaumet, Eugène Fromentin, and English painter Augustus Osborne Lamplough, used ambiguity by the way of atmospheric effects in their depiction of desert landscapes to advance notions of the imperialist project that underpinned Orientalism (Figs. 4, 5).Footnote 18
Gustave Achille Guillaumet (1840–77), Le Sahara, 1867. Oil on Canvas, 110.5 x 200.5 cm, Donation of the family of Gustave Guillaumet, 1888, Musée d’Orsay, © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. Source: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/le-sahara-9121.
Eugène Fromentin, Windstorm on the Esparto Plains of the Sahara, 1864. Oil on canvas, 117 x 163 cm. Source: Important Works From the Najd Collection/Lot. 10 at Sotheby’s.com, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2019/important-works-from-the-najd-collection/eugene-fromentin-windstorm-on-the-esparto-plains?locale=en.
The pictorial depiction of deserts as desolate and empty, their sparse features showing evidence of the ravages of wind and sun, echoed the oft-portrayed architectural degradation of North African cities, which advanced the notion that the Orient could be salvaged from ruin by European civilization, while discreetly absenting the local populations that were subject to colonial violence. These emptied and antidramatic compositions can be considered adjacent to the pastoral, in which, as Mitchell describes, the “harmony” sought in landscape is read as “compensation for the screening off of the actual violence perpetrated there.”Footnote 19
Fazal Sheikh: Desert Bloom
In 2010, American photographer Fazal Sheikh was one of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers invited to Israel and the West Bank as part of “This Place,” a project originated by French photographer Frédéric Brenner intended to formulate “a visual counter-narrative to the prevailing, often polarized representations of Israel and the West Bank in both national and international news media.”Footnote 20 Brenner claimed that the aims of the project were twofold: first, “to be an incubator for great art and to spark new ways of seeing, thinking, and talking about Israel and the West Bank.” “The second goal,” said Brenner, “is more challenging and difficult to measure. This is a diverse and fragmented project … and with no political agenda. We are not looking to promote a particular way of seeing or thinking about Israel and the West Bank. Rather, we are looking to disrupt the current shouting match and by creating faults and fissures to open up the possibility for real insights—insights about the place but also about ourselves.”Footnote 21
Over a series of extended visits to the region, Sheikh produced The Erasure Trilogy, consisting of three bodies of work: Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba. Footnote 22 Desert Bloom, the exhibition featured in “This Place” and the second project of the trilogy, is a series of forty-eight inkjet prints that utilize aerial perspectives to explore the terrestrial vestiges of the “Bedouin Nakba.” The term refers to a period between the 1948 war and 1953, during which time “the Israeli military expelled about 90 per cent of the 100,000 Bedouins of the Negev to the West Bank and Gaza, and further into Jordan and Egypt,” and those who remained were displaced and concentrated in a more arid and saline area of the desert.Footnote 23 Upon a site visit to the Negev, Sheikh realized the need for an aerial view that would afford a greater context for thinking about the transformation of the land that had been brought about by David Ben-Gurion’s Zionist invocation to “make the desert bloom.” Taken by a handheld camera from a two-seater Cessna at an altitude of 2,000 feet, Sheikh’s aerial photographs of the Negev capture the cumulative effects of decades of “urbanization, militarization, mining, construction, contamination, and destruction, as well as the continued displacement of the Bedouins.”Footnote 24
In certain photographs, patches of flattened earth imprinted with patterned lines reveal where bulldozers had recently destroyed Bedouin homes, while others feature geometric shapes of bunkers holding nuclear waste, and still others show trees where once were none, as evidence of Israel’s ongoing afforestation project (Fig. 6).Footnote 25 Unlike in Ristelhueber’s Fait, these photographs are accompanied by detailed interpretative text, so that rather than activating aesthetic abstraction through a lack of contextual information, the lines, holes, and stains in and on the ground are given meaning through ground-level narrative. Gathered in consultation with Bedouin community members, pilots, geographers, and scholars, these texts include dates, and coordinates of longitude and latitude of the sites photographed, giving the viewers of the photographs the necessary situated information to understand the shapes and lines, thereby permitting an indexicality that works in collaboration with aesthetics.Footnote 26 Rather than promoting ambiguity on the part of the images and a lack of interpretive agency among viewers as in Fait, Desert Bloom speaks to the potential of revelation in aerial photos as both temporal and spatial information are made visible and accessible.
Fazal Sheikh, Desert Bloom (No.4), 2011. Fazal Sheikh, Desert Bloom (Notes), vol. 2 of The Erasure Trilogy (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015), 8. © Fazal Sheikh, images and text. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Just as Desert Bloom’s mandate on aerial witnessing differs from that of Fait, Sheikh’s appropriations of aerial views also diverge from the conventional operation of aerial images as “master-view” documents, in the recognition that if these perspectives have any hope of assembling “truth” (meaning a faithful reconstruction of “what happened”), they must be put into conversation with ground-level knowledge that originates from multiple sources. The foundational principle for this power-shifting dynamic is achieved through building narratives based on many voices versus a singular narrator who so often gives a godlike voice to the “god’s-eye view.” Countering this so-called omniscient perspective, Sheikh draws upon what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges” and “partial perspectives” by incorporating a range of ground-level actors—actual inhabitants of the places that are featured in the photographs.Footnote 27 This arrangement allows for a reflexive relationship between above and below, challenging the conventional and misleading classification of aerial images as empirical documents created through a disembodied techno-omniscience.
It is the collaboration between oral testimony and photography Sheikh encourages that activates the histories held in the lines and stains that mark the land. As oral historians Alexander Freund and Alistair Thompson write, “photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation. Looked at in this way, as evidence of something beyond itself, a photograph can best be understood not as an answer or an end to inquiry, but as an invitation to look more closely, and to ask questions.”Footnote 28 The interrogative is at play in both Fait and Desert Bloom, but to different ends. Ristelhueber seems to suggest that aerial photographs pose almost unanswerable questions through their inherent ambiguity, and that this open-endedness endows the images with more poetic than evidentiary value. Sheikh, on the other hand, gives viewers the opportunity to ask the “rational questions” that Sekula argues are necessary to produce answers from aerial images as ensembles of indexical signs, while not completely isolating the images into operationality.
In 2014, Fazal Sheikh shared the aerial photographs that he had taken of the Negev with Eyal Weizman, the founding director of the research agency Forensic Architecture. In an essay entitled “The Conflict Shoreline,” Weizman reflects on Sheikh’s photographs, quickly identifying the crux of the relationship between aerial perspectives and “ground truth.” He writes, “While it is on the surface of the earth that the entanglement of land use, politics, conflicts, and climate change is played out, it is from the aerial perspective that it most clearly comes into view.”Footnote 29 Through this set of relationships, Weizman arrives at a novel approach to aerial images. Stepping away from more traditional metaphors that envision the land as seen from above as a text to be read, he describes them with more visual terms, as “artifacts of double exposure: they are photographs of photographs.”Footnote 30
As the desert floor becomes inscribed by the effects of climate forces, human enterprise, and animal behavior, “the surface of the desert thus resembles a photographic inscription, exposed to the direct and indirect contacts of human and climatic forces in a way similar to how film is exposed to light.” Weizman continues, with a claim antithetical to those who advance that the aerial perspective renders the desert landscape a cryptic collection of shapes and signatures, “For those willing and able to read its surface closely, the desert can reveal not only what is present, but also the subtle traces of what has been erased: traces of ruined homes and small agricultural installations, of fields and wells that can sometimes be noticed under the grid of newly planted forests, as well as the dark stains of long-removed livestock pens” (Fig. 7).Footnote 31 Instead of using aerial imagery to produce a pre-formed narrative of place (as, for example, in Ristelhueber’s Fait), Sheikh instead chooses to be open to ground-level information, allowing it to lead the story.Footnote 32
Fazal Sheikh, Desert Bloom (No. 10), 2011. Fazal Sheikh, Desert Bloom (Notes), vol. 2 in The Erasure Trilogy (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015), 10. © Fazal Sheikh, images and text. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Between Ambiguity and Erasure
At first glance the aerial images comprising Sophie Ristelhueber’s Fait bear resemblance to those of Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom. However, upon closer investigation, distinctions emerge. If Ristelhueber’s mandate in Fait was that of ambiguity (i.e., how little “we” see from above), then Sheikh’s counter-stance is one of revelation (i.e., if one knows what to look for, there is much to witness). Regarding the production of landscape, the Kuwait desert as represented by Ristelhueber is empty and generalized, whereas the Negev in Sheikh’s site-specific collaborative project is cast as full, of memories, people, architectures, agriculture, animals, and events. If Fait nearly erases the presence of humans through the encouragement of a poetic interpretation of the Kuwait desert from above, which calls upon a refusal of indexical signs in the aerial images, then Desert Bloom insists that the lines and marks on the surface of the Negev give evidence of the existence and resilience of its inhabitants. Privileging ground truth over the aerial aesthetic as the defining operation of the series, Sheikh demonstrates that aerial images can exist simultaneously as objects of both art and instrumentality, straddling aesthetic and epistemic categories.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Brahim El Guabli and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev for inviting me to participate in the 2023 MESA panel Ecocritical Groundings: Rethinking Tamazghan Middle Eastern Landscapes and in this editorial series. I am grateful to both for their time and valuable editorial remarks. Thanks as well to Fazal Sheikh for his generosity in providing image files from the Desert Bloom series, associated publications, and heartfelt email exchanges that greatly contributed to the writing of this article. Finally, thank you to my Amazigh friend, Idir Yachou in Zagora, Morocco, who has taught me many things about “le vrai désert.”
Open access
