The history of humanity is an ornate chronicle that tells the story of how humanity sought to transcend itself. Remaining virtually unchanged for millennia, man created tools that enabled him to conquer new spaces, transform the ecosystem, and establish beneficial rules of existence. The development of art followed a related path, demonstrating a process associated with the expansion of the horizon of human wonder. By transcending the boundaries of habitual habitat, man expanded the depth of his knowledge through the perception of new, previously unseen facets of the universe. This, of course, was reflected in art, which transcended the usual limits of copying, naturalism and figurativeness to move toward the ideals of abstraction.

In the field of photographic art, one important figure who took part in this process was the American photographer William Garnett. Garnett, who had a passion for art and aviation since his youth, became famous for his pictures taken from a bird's-eye view. He shot his images from his own Cessna, which he acquired a few years after the end of World War II. Garnett's compositions differed from conventional landscapes and thus attracted the attention of the art community, resulting in the photographer becoming a multiple recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work was part of the famous E. Steichen exhibition project "A Generation of Man".

What was Garnett's creative merit? After all, photographers have been taking pictures of the world from high points since the middle of the nineteenth century - for example, from a balloon Paris was still photographed by Nadar. The secret of Garnett's success lay in a fundamentally new attitude to the subject, which, in turn, determined the nature of the corresponding compositional solutions. Unlike his predecessors, Garnett was not interested in classical views of the Earth, with legible geographical landmarks and objects with a functional sense. Rather, he sought to view the world in a new way, through the eyes of a subject not bound by the constraints of gravity, dualistic notions of top or bottom, the applied purpose of objects, and the content of the subject.

Garnett viewed the world through the eyes of a man of the future, whose vision would transcend everyday routine and stereotypical thinking mechanisms to open his consciousness to the vastness of the universe and conquer new unexplored heights of the cosmos. This man of the future, tired of meaningless everyday life and empty conflicts leading to destructive wars and catastrophes, had to look differently, striving to overcome the limitations of his own nature in order to achieve something greater. Such a person had to elevate his perception above the level of lower needs in order to look at the beauty of the world from a bird's eye view. Looking at the landscape below him, he should have seen not the curves of rivers suitable for agriculture, not the masses of forests suitable for building materials, and not the ridges of mountains that were obstacles to transportation or reservoirs of resources. The new man was to see in them the unity of a higher plan, a fragment of a world not divided into parts, a chord in the harmonious symphony of the universal orchestra. A picture was to be revealed to him, devoid of the need for a lowly consumerist interpretation, drawing attention only to the truly meaningful facets of the universe. Hence, from the perception of the average individual this picture should appear abstract, devoid of "understandable" reference points, showing no simplistic division into superficially distinguishable constituent parts, and free of the propagandistic content characteristic of didactic art. In this picture of the future, only fanciful lines of fantastic forms, striking combinations of textures and irregular anomalies that will constantly remind the viewer that humanity still knows only a small fraction of where and for what reasons it exists should retain significance.

Artem Loginov, for "History of One Photo"