Meet William A. Garnett

Read About the Photographer William A. Garnett

I was discharged and heard you could hitchhike on the transport taking GIs home. The airplane was full, but the captain let me sit in the navigator’s seat so I had a command view. I was amazed at the variety and beauty of these United States. I had never seen anything like that—in a book, in school, or since then. So I changed my career.William A. Garnett  

William Garnett (American, 1916–2006) took his first cross-country flight after serving as a United States Army Signal Corps cameraman during World War II. What he saw below inspired him to learn how to pilot a plane so he could photograph the American landscape. Garnett’s aerial photographs resemble Abstract Expressionist paintings or views through a microscope. As landscapes, they do not have the conventional grounding of a horizon line. All reveal astonishing patterns that are not seen from the ground.

Garnett honed his elegant design sensibility well before earning a pilot’s license. Before the war, he attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California. Later, he headed the Pasadena Police Department’s photography lab. In the 1940s and 1950s, he began to rack up flying hours around Los Angeles, speaking out about the area’s increasing air pollution. He illustrated Nathaniel Owings’s American Aesthetic, a book about land-use practices.

During 10,000 hours of flying, Garnett simultaneously piloted a plane while photographing out the window—traveling above every state and many parts of the world. His light 1956 Cessna airplane allowed him to fly to just the right location to capture subjects with precision. At first, he experimented with a variety of camera formats and films, but later found that two 35 mm cameras (one loaded with black-and-white film, the other with color film) best suited his needs.

Garnett’s work defies the stereotype of aerial photography as purely scientific and without artistry. He became the first aerial photographer to earn a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• How did Garnett’s background as a photographer and art student before becoming a pilot give him an advantage over other aerial photographers?
• Why do you think aerial photography might have been stereotyped as “purely scientific and without artistry”?

An art movement that developed in New York City in the 1940s and 50s featuring large canvases filled with nonrepresentational imagery and gestural brushwork. Instead of showing recognizable objects, abstract expressionist paintings are characterized by line, color, and brushstrokes used in an expressive manner.