Having survived nine crash landings, aviator Alfred Buckham created some of the earliest and most awe-inspiring bird’s-eye images. To achieve them, he risked his life, employing perilous, death-defying acts of ingenuity.
“What scenes of Grandeur and Beauty!” exclaimed Thomas Baldwin in his 1786 account, Airopaidia, of a balloon journey over Chester during which he created one of the earliest aerial drawings. Everything was “brought up in a new manner to the eye… The imagination… was overwhelmed”.
Today, we take aerial views for granted. The advent of drones has popularised amateur aerial photography, while tools such as Google Earth supply bird’s-eye views in seconds. However, in the Victorian era, aerial images were the result of extraordinary acts of ingenuity involving hot air balloons, pigeons, and even rockets.
Alfred Buckham pictured in 1918 – he was a serving pilot during World War One (Credit: Collection of Richard and John Buckham)
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But a new and exciting way of taking to the skies was just around the corner, as goggles were donned for the first forays into aviation. This emergent industry, coupled with the outbreak of World War One – where mapping and intelligence gathering became mission-critical – offered radical new possibilities for aerial photography. One remarkable pioneer was fearless World War One aviator Alfred Buckham (1879-1956), an irrepressible risk-taker who survived nine crash landings. Though the last of these resulted in a serious throat injury that required a laryngectomy and reduced his voice to a whisper, he continued to take to the air, combining his love of flying with his passion for photography, leaning perilously out of aeroplanes to capture some of history’s earliest and most awe-inspiring aerial photographs.
Edinburgh, by Alfred G. Buckham, c. 1920. pic.twitter.com/78OzlVXtiR
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His death-defying images are the subject of a major new exhibition, Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The exhibition shares Buckham’s dramatic perspective on landmarks in Britain and the Americas, from the snaking, sun-streaked path of the Thames in The Heart of the Empire (1923), loaned from the V&A, to newly completed monuments such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, both photographed for Fortune magazine during a series of flights in 1931 of record-breaking length. More than 100 photographs and objects are on display, including Buckham’s letters, passport and camera – all telling the story, voiced by his grandson Richard, of his madcap aerial adventures and innovative post-production.
Notes on the back of the images testify to the thrilling conditions in which they were created. We learn, for example, that when he shot The Thunderstorm (1920), “the lightning was blinding and the thunder unbearably loud”. He continues: “The aeroplane sometimes fell several hundreds of feet in deep air pockets. Immediately after taking this photograph our machine seemed to be on fire, and the pilot and myself experienced an electric shock.” was rewarded with the photo he named Over the Top: the Andes at 19,700 ft (1931), an image that feels as though we are perched upon its vast snowy peaks.
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