By way of introduction, I am a retired Professor of Architecture from UC Berkeley. While my academic career principally focused on building science it also included stints in academic administration, study abroad programs, and teaching courses in design and documentary photography. For over twenty years, I have been taking low-level aerial photographs using cameras lofted by kites. While this might seem a bit quirky, it turns out that kites are a very practical platform for aerial photography and remote sensing at an intimate scale. As my work in kite aerial photography (KAP) matured, the technique led to topics, relationships, and communities that have been richly rewarding. So much so that KAP is now my primary creative pursuit.

 

My kite aerial photography

 

My first forays into KAP sprang from a confluence of photography and radio-controlled sailplanes, two of my favorite pastimes. In 1995, after playing with mounting a camera on one of my planes, I made a shift to kites, which tend to be a stable, self-tending platform. Since switching to kites, I have progressed through three stages.

 

 

A hand-sewn, seven-foot Rokkaku kite and my Singer Featherweight

 

The first stage, lasting several years, involved sorting out how to fly kites, mount the camera, compose the photographs, and keep my lofted gear from crashing. I have now designed a dozen robotic camera cradles including one that became the cover story for the inaugural issue of MAKE magazine. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum exhibited this cradle and twenty of my aerial images when they included MAKE in the 2006 National Design Triennial exhibit.

 

 

KAP Cradle No. 12: a three-axis, radio-controlled rig carrying an EOS-M3 camera with an 11-22mm lens.

 

During my middle period, again lasting several years, I traveled broadly with my KAP gear in a continual quest for aerial images compositionally worthy of display. This was a fine period of practice and skill honing that yielded satisfying work, the placement of images in publications, coverage in the press, and a few exhibits. During a sabbatical year in 2003, I was fortunate enough to spend time as a Visiting Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and as an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, both formative experiences. I later spent a year as Associate Artist at the Headland Center for the Arts, all great fun for a building scientist.

 

 

Example photographs taken in Denmark during the middle period.

 

I am now well settled into my third period, the use of kite aerial photography in sustained studies of specific landscapes. I came across the South Bay salt ponds while taking a series of hikes with microbiologist Dr. Wayne Lanier during my sabbatical at the Exploratorium. On these hikes, Wayne would photograph through his field microscope while I took overhead views of the sampled environment. Not knowing much about the South Bay landscape, I was struck by the wonderful variety of colors and textures associated with the salt ponds. This was fun territory to photograph. After learning more about the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, I developed a proposal in 2007 to continue photographing the South Bay landscape in service of the restoration efforts. The Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife issued Special Use Permits granting requisite permissions for kite flying conditioned on seasonal restrictions to protect wildlife. This project, still underway with the enthusiastic support of governing agencies, has blossomed into a major undertaking.

 

 

Example “color and texture” images from the South Bay.

 

My South Bay project to date

 

On approach to SFO, airline passengers glancing out the window will see the vivid patchwork of the South Bay’s salt evaporation ponds. These ponds support a five-year-long process of solar evaporation that yields 600,000 tons of salt a year. As San Francisco Bay water makes the trip from 2% to 32% salinity, it evolves through a succession of bright colors - evidence of halophilic algae, archaea, bacteria, and other organisms that thrive at specific elevated salinities. These tiny creatures paint the current day’s version of what has been a remarkably transitional landscape.

 

Over the last decade, the landscape’s transitions have taken a new direction with the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. After a century of industrial salt production, the project is reshaping thousands of acres of former salt ponds to serve the public missions of wildlife habitat, recreation, and flood control. Portions of this rehabilitated landscape are now open to the public. There, hikers can bring binoculars to bear on abundant wildlife, explore diverse halophilic microorganisms with a field microscope, seek out early engineering interventions scattered across the Bay shallows, or appreciate the intriguing juxtapositions afforded by the landscape. And juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions.

 

 

Remnants of previous South Bay occupations – boat landings, abandoned Drawbridge, early bay bridges, and the quaintly Victorian Mallard II dredge.

 

I started by photographing the colors and textures associated with the various salinities of salt ponds in the South Bay. Curiously, you can see little of a pond’s color or bottom detail while hiking on the ground due to sky reflection from the pond’s surface.

 

I was having a great time bagging new colors, as though trophy animals when I realized that many of the aerial images contained vestigial remnants of the marsh channels that once served square miles of South Bay marsh. Looking more closely, I also found traces of old boat landings, 19th-century salt works, and curious artifacts left by over a century of dredging and duck hunting.

 

What began as a photographic romp through a visually compelling landscape slowly shifted toward documenting the landscape’s history and deciphering traces of it evident in my aerial photographs. My aerial images often presented puzzling artifacts and these fueled visits to libraries, map rooms, and local experts. Then it was back to the field for more photographs. After photographing for several years, I came to appreciate that the landscape was still in transition, and rapid transition at that as the salt pond restoration project gained stride. This realization has lent a sense of urgency to the project.

 

My first project on retiring from the university was writing Saltscapes (Heyday Books), a book presenting a history of the South Bay landscape as revealed through my aerial photographs. The book provided a handy summary of work to date and conveys a good sense of my approach to the South Bay.

 

 

Two collages from the color and texture phase of my salt pond work.

 

Over the last sixteen years, I have made about 250 trips to photograph the South Bay. The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project has used my images for outreach and in support of science projects that guide the restoration. For instance, my low-level aerial images of Drawbridge were used to “ground truth” the locations of invasive vegetation as predicted by the analysis of satellite data. My photographs have appeared in video segments produced by MAKE TV, PBS Newshour, the Exploratorium, and local news stations. I have mounted several exhibits of the South Bay work, including a permanent display of fifty images at the Exploratorium, large panoramas in the Oakland Museum’s exhibit Above & Below: Stories from Our Changing Bay, and a dozen diptychs for the SFO Museum.

 

While the South Bay’s current day juxtapositions provide an interesting glimpse into the landscape’s history, they also reveal the first traces, just emerging, of bold initiatives for its future. The restoration project, backed by a broad coalition of advocates, finds itself in a race with rising seas to reestablish marshlands while there is still time to do so. Much depends on the success of their efforts.

 

Links

 

Since you have made it this far. I will leave you with a few links for further information.

 

A MAKE TV (PBS) segment about my kite aerial photography.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=swqFA9Mvq5M

 

The Hidden Ecologies Project blog:

research-benton.ced.berkeley.edu/he/

 

Benton’s general Flickr photostream:

www.flickr.com/photos/kap_cris

 

Acknowledgments

 

The Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, has provided patient counsel and, importantly, a Special Use Permit to take kite aerial photographs in the refuge.

 

The California Department of Fish & Wildlife provided encouragement and permitted access to the Eden Landing Ecological Reserve.

 

The Exploratorium provided safe harbor during my 2003 Sabbatical and ongoing encouragement to pursue the aerial photography more seriously.

 

Dr. Wayne Lanier has been a steadfast companion and collaborator in exploring the South Bay.

 

Heyday Books made the development of Saltscapes: the Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton a lovely experience.

 

UC Berkeley’s Committee on Research provided modest support for project expenses.