The Ultimate Pull-Back

Get as far away as possible

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Does it seem a bit like cheating to include aerial photography here? It’s normally thought about in a different way, as its own specialized form, but it’s also by far the most detached and distanced way of shooting. It comes with the same cautionary note as the two other kinds of distanced shooting that I just showed, and while most of us tend to think of it as a desirable opportunity to be relished – having your own aircraft for an hour or two – there’s another point of view, as I remember from an assignment in the Philippines with many other photographers for a book.

I was flying back to Manila with Bruno Barbey and we were comparing notes on how the previous week had gone, which wasn’t well. Some years before, I’d had a military helicopter for three days over the Sulu Sea, which had been amazing, and I was quite envious of the assigned aerial photographer in our group, Yann ArthusBertrand. Bruno surprised me by having no interest in that: “Everything’s too far away. There are no people, no emotion, no life.” This was yet another way of expressing the basic divide among photographers between detachment and restraint on the one hand, and involvement and closeness on the other. Bruno’s view, which I have a lot of sympathy for, is the classic reportage one, but at the same time I can’t sh