‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.’ The context of Barnes’s remark is the 100-year span in which aerial photography evolved from its 19th-century birth in the wicker cradle of a gas balloon to the miraculous moment in 1968 when an astronaut aboard Apollo 8 took the photograph known as ‘Earthrise’: the darling blue ball of planet Earth rising up over the arid, inhospitable surface of the moon. And all around our little blue globe, darkness. ‘Earthrise’ administered a psychic shock by providing ocular proof of our true position in the universe: insignificant, precarious, lost in the expanding emptiness of space.
All those requiring further proof should make their way to the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, where an exhibition called At Altitude explores with incongruous calm both the aftershocks of ‘Earthrise’ and the rumblings that preceded it.
In the fourth and smallest room of the show, inside a Perspex cube on a plinth, a thick little volume is open to one of the earliest aerial drawings, made from a balloon basket.
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