Although it seems like a great many years ago, because it was, one of the things that astonished me when I first learned to fly small airplanes was how different the world looks at altitude.

I’m not talking about the 30 or 32,000 feet of commercial airliners. And although I would love someday to fly up to orbital heights to see the curve of the earth and the glow of the atmosphere, I’m not talking about that either.

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“Work in Progress” by Barton Lewis
Published by Fall Line Press, 2024
Review by W. Scott Olsen

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What astonished me was the low altitude—1000, maybe 2000 feet above the ground. At that altitude, the world is transformed. You can still recognize everything about it: the color of someone’s shirt, whether or not a car needs to be washed, whether a traffic light is red or green. You can see laundry on a line in a backyard, cattle in a field, and someone walking a grocery cart from the store to their car. But you see these things in ways no one on the ground can imagine.

Things which on the ground I perceived to be distant from each other were, in fact, close neighbors. Hard divisions, such as a river, became nothing more than interesting lines in an otherwise quilted and woven landscape.

Perspective means everything. Change perspective, no matter what field or endeavor we’re talking about, and the whole endeavor is transformed. Think of a key change in music.

At 1000, maybe 2000 feet above the ground, patterns invisible to us in our everyday walkabouts become revealed. And not only revealed—they become an organizing principle. They become the way you see the land.

Where I live, on the North American prairie, the vanishing-point straightness of section roads is both beautiful and mesmerizing. At that altitude, people will wave at you, and you have the ability to wave back. In other words, you are in a completely different place, with a completely different point of view, but you are still in relation to life and the present moment on the ground.

I’m thinking about this because I have a book called Work in Progress by Peter Essick on my desk today. Work in Progress has a simple theme. Essick owns a drone. He flies it over construction sites in Georgia and he points the camera down. What he reveals from low altitude—sometimes, I would imagine, just 100 feet or so above the site, sometimes more—is a world of patterns and shapes, of geometries and shadows that is astonishingly beautiful.

The tracks made by the treads of heavy equipment are, at their core, geometric wonders. The color of Georgia’s red clay put up against concrete is a striking contrast. The shadows left by studs in a wall being built, as well as the angles and lines, hold a familiar formal beauty. Leading lines of any sort can be interpreted as narrative implications, so the images here hold the promise of a story. Looking at them has a bit of an archeological flair.

The images have no captions and no explanations. We do not know exactly what is being built below us, nor do we know the exact altitude of the drone Essick is flying. Nearly all of the images are shot straight down. This is important. Shooting straight down flattens the landscape. Without vertical relief, this approach elevates and celebrates line, pattern, and color. The images are representational, but that is not their power. This is a book that celebrates the beauty of found, unintentional, narratively complicated shapes.

In a brief afterward, which he titles “Learning to Fly,” Essick writes,

Photography has a history of documenting everyday life. In my neighborhood in Atlanta, construction activity is an everyday occurrence. It wasn’t until I started flying a drone that I realized construction sites offered so many different visual perspectives. The textures and colors of human-altered landscapes are endlessly fascinating. Seeing and photographing this landscape from the air has opened up for me new ways of creative expression.

He continues,

I find it hard to explain my deeper motives for photographing construction sites. On a personal level, I enjoy the unique challenge of capturing an ever-changing landscape. Construction sites change by the day, and the light and exposure are never the same, so there’s always a sense of joy in capturing the perfect moment. Soil, wood, steel, and concrete relate to each other in infinite varieties of order and disorder. Surface reflections can create altering moods and various meanings. I enjoy capturing it all.

Finally, he says,

I’m also trying to document the environmental impact of construction, land use, and suburban sprawl.

This last point, the economic or political one, is a fine point to make. The idea is hit harder by Dan Chapman in another concluding essay called “Building our future in the urban south.” In this, Chapman makes a call for sustainable development of any urban area, but especially around Atlanta.

Reading these points, though, turning back into the book, I was struck by something else. The images almost demand that you linger, that you try to decipher what story you’re actually seeing. It could be something as simple as a field crisscrossed by tread marks and then dusted with a light layer of snow. Those tracks were all made in the process of some goal; curiosity leads us to wonder about their making while experiencing the beauty of the present scene.

Another image, where a field appears to be layered in plastic, is in an abstract sense a siren song. In a representational sense, I know what I’m seeing but I have absolutely no clue what’s going on, and so I keep looking. Likewise, an image that seems to peer down into a hole or atrium is a celebration of angles, colors, and depth. Sometimes the answer is obvious, sometimes not, but lingering over the images and parsing out the events that precede their creation is an act of revelation and an experience of joy.

The few images which are not taken straight down are not a jarring contradiction. They seem to be after the same emphasis-on-graphics effect, but the angle gives a different perception of scale and spatial relation.  The few people who appear in this book, minuscule and at some distance below the drone, are good reminders that, really, what we’re seeing is exactly what’s there.

There is, of course, a large library of works on how we respond to abstract art. Non-representational shapes and colors reveal something about our psychology and perhaps our soul. When the abstract, however, is simultaneously representative, we get a double punch. The work in progress in Work in Progress is on the ground and in our heads. This is a book to examine and treasure.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.