Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest by Jason Weems (review)

A book on modernization through aerial photography in the Midwest in the 1930s? There may be a lot of reasons to immediately skip it. Isn’t modernity a quintessentially urban phenomenon that has nothing to do with country life, and certainly not with country life in the Midwest as we imagine it? And what possible relationship could there be between country life and aerial photography, something we tend to spontaneously associate with warfare and, more generally, power and colonialism? Finally, isn’t there a kind of inherent contradiction between the terms “culture” and “Midwest”? The best response to such biases is the book itself. Jason Weems’s Barnstorming the Prairie is an amazing, refreshing and thoroughly thought-provoking study, a study that is not only a major contribution to our knowledge of Midwestern culture but also a superb example of a broad and interdisciplinary examination of what seems at first glance to simply be a technical device: aerial photography.

The basic situation that Jason Weems’s book addresses is this: Aerial pictures—that is, vertically recorded panoramic representations of the (in)famous grid-structure of the Midwest’s flat and treeless farmland—were used by U.S. agrarian authorities to impose an ambitious program of both collectivization and rationalizing of farming in the years of the Great Depression as a solution to the negative effects that unscientific means of production had had on soil and productivity. The use of aerial photography has therefore been seen many decades later as an instrument in the (forced) conversion from small-scale individual farming to large-scale, state-controlled agribusiness. While Weems does not deny this version of history, the story he tells in Barnstorming the Prairies is much more complex and multilayered and helps to correct a large number of stereotypes regarding the keywords of his study: “aerial photography” and “Midwestern culture.” Weems succeeds in doing so by following three paths: first, a historical overview of the “vertical” view in the context of a dramatically “horizontal” natural environment; second, a cultural studies–inspired reinterpretation of the reception of aerial views as well as the actual experience of flying by local audiences; and third, an interdisciplinary approach to the photographic material in which he links it to sources from other media (pre-photographic drawings, contemporary paintings and architectural and urban planning sketches and photographs) and provides an excellent close reading of the material.

In this analysis, the crucial term is of course the “grid,” an icon of modernity but also of something almost premodern, that is, the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the Jeffersonian ideal of the republic as the collaborative effort of many small independent and landowning farmers, who were each allotted a geometrically equal part of the prairie during the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. The Land Ordinance that organized the methodical division of the (supposedly empty) land in 1785 followed perfectly mathematical rules whose philosophical and political underpinnings should never be overlooked, Weems rightfully argues, when analyzing the often-positive reactions of small local Midwestern farmers to the imposition of large-scale grid structures and the accompanying new structures of production during the 1930s. Moreover, one should not forget that the aerial view was neither something new nor something impersonal or purely objectifying. Aerial views have a very long history, from the elevated and bird’s-eye views popular in the Manifest Destiny era to the first photographs taken from balloons in the 19th century. In addition, these views did not simply reflect the point of view of the hegemonic power of the times (the landlord or the general, for instance); their cultural and ideological meanings were much more diverse, if not open to anti-hegemonic reinterpretations: A more or less disembodied bird’s-eye view, for instance, capable of displaying the grid-like structure of land ownership, displayed the fundamental...