Aerials

Thursday April 14th, 2011

Washington DC-based photographer Cameron Davidson is on the verge of releasing a book documenting his “20-plus year love affair with the Chesapeake Bay watershed.” The book will be all aerial photography, “from Cooperstown, New York to the Capes of Virginia at the Atlantic,” and it encompasses “six states and every major river.”

And his images are well worth a look. I find myself amazed by something as seemingly ordinary as an office building, which he has captured as a site of a thousand little stories in a thousand lit windows. In an interview with My Modern Met, Cameron describes what he has learned from doing this work:

Life is short and we live on an incredibly beautiful planet that is scarred. Everywhere I shoot, I see new and compelling landscapes that draw my attention. The interaction of man and land can be incredibly striking from the air. I recently shot in Africa for an editorial story and photograph landscapes that were originally cultivated several thousand years ago. Even though those fields were no longer in use, the marks of man were still upon them.

It is indeed this lesson that animates Cameron’s work on the Chesapeake Bay. Writing in the Washington Post, David Fahrenthold describes the story contained in Cameron’s images:

The images also bear witness to the bay’s vulnerability and the fragility of its future. That’s because nearly all of the shots show signs of human intrusion: our cows fouling a country stream, our nets trapping fish, our homes and bright-blue swimming pools colonizing a neck of bayside land. As the bay watershed spreads, we have spread with it and tried to make it work for us—as a seafood pantry, as a real-estate amenity, as a playground, as a gutter.

Head over to Cameron’s portfolio to see more of these photos.

-Asad