James Wallace Black
1860, 13 October
Aerial view of Boston

Albumen print, from glass negative
10 1/16 x 7 15/16 in (25.6 x 20.2 cm)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Robert O. Dougan Collection, Gift of Warner Communications Inc., 1981 (1981.1229.4)
 
Considered to be the earliest surviving aerial photograph.
 
Comments from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (The Metropolitan Museum of Art):
 
Two years after the French photographer Nadar conducted his earliest experiments in balloon flight, the Boston photographer James Wallace Black ascended over the city to make the first successful aerial photographs in America. He flew on Samuel King's hot-air balloon, the "Queen of the Air," and exposed several glass-plate negatives, including this extraordinary, if imperfect, view as much lunar landscape as "Beantown." Almost immediately, aerial photography would be put to use by the Union Army. By 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed a civilian Balloon Corps to serve under the Bureau of Topographical Engineers to spy from the skies on Confederate troops during the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia.
 
[Accessed: 5 April 2010]
 
LL/36172