Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above by Caren Kaplan (review)

In her sweeping, richly illustrated work on the uses of aerial views in wartime aftermaths, Caren Kaplan is interested in inhabiting the spaces-between. Creating and viewing aerial observations—by balloon, drone, or even optical-illusion painting—is a messy, uneven process that obfuscates the separations between science and art even as it creates them. Neither entirely instrumental "objective realism" nor aesthetic sensibility, views from the air reveal how the overlapping aftermaths of war infiltrate everyday life until "it becomes difficult to discover a place or time or way of life in which war is not palpable or present" (p. 132). Kaplan argues that the construction of aerial imagery as a singular, modern, "God's-eye-view" was achieved in fits and starts, and that the "God's-eye-view" itself is not a monolith. It obscures as much as it reveals, especially as aftermaths—a term she uses to describe the non-linear flow of time, place, and space that pushes wartime's "when" and "where" boundaries—continue to scar both the landscapes viewed and the people viewing. The longue-durée view of modern aerial views, Kaplan argues, reveals that all views from above are situated in a wartime aftermath.

Aerial Aftermaths is split into five body chapters, an introduction analyzing aerial photographs of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 terror attacks, and an afterword exploring aerial imagery in the drone age. The first chapter traces the eighteenth-century First Military Survey of Scotland as a hybrid between early modern bird's-eye-view imaginaries and "modern" scientific practices of mapmaking. "Unabashedly political in provenance," the Survey portrayed the Highlands, a territory newly folded into British state infrastructure, from above, but used an amalgam of ground-based tools, techniques, and media to "empty" the territory of history and meaning (p. 35). The second and third case studies examine two other types of Enlightenment-era aerial views: aerostation and in-the-round panorama paintings. Early balloonists recorded their feelings alongside their scientific data, disturbing the "desire for a totalized overview" that military aerial observation was imagined to provide (p. 95). Entrepreneurial panorama artists used theatrical design techniques as pedagogy, normalizing curated aerial views as a way of "seeing all" at once; wartime landscapes, which brought distant battlefields into immediate sensation, were especially popular. For her final two chapters, Kaplan shifts her geographic focus to the area currently referred to as the "Middle East," and her technological focus to powered flight and mechanical reproduction. Interwar British aerial photography of Iraq, she argues, disrupts dominant historical narratives of World War I and aerial surveillance by showing how "political violence extends and expands" beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of "war," even up to the "colonial present" (p. 139). She is especially interested in how observers were trained to read desert landscapes using manuals that "perform[ed] modernism" by attempting to codify messy, chaotic affective experience through abstraction (p. 172). The final chapter engages with three late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art installations that use aerial images of the "Middle East." Kaplan argues that in the First Persian Gulf War media landscape, aerial views of arid places flouted traditional photojournalistic tropes, erasing some wartime aftermaths and revealing others.

The greatest strength of Aerial Aftermaths is also its greatest weakness. Kaplan's spectacular interdisciplinarity—photography, art history, Middle East studies, war and terrorism studies, history of technology, modernity and modernism—means that she engages more with the literatures than she does with historical voices. This is not to say that she avoids detailed historical studies. Her earlier chapters on mapmaking, surveying, and panoramas feature close readings of historical images and texts, and her analysis of the manuals provided to World War I pilots flying over Iraq is masterful, but her explicit goal is to complicate how we talk about war, peace, and geopolitics from above. Because of this, historians of technology looking for archivally-sourced histories of pre-twentieth-century views...