CAME ACROSS THE AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY of Brooklyn-based Zack Seckler early last week, and have not been able to get these astonishingly lovely shots of the beautiful world we live in out of my mind. They remind me quite a bit of Steve Back’s series Terra Incognita, of the pink lakes of Australia.
Seckler’s career began in photojournalism, but he would become drawn to the more hands-on, creative approach of art and commercial photography. Despite the shift, his artistic work still carries a strong hands-off documentary style, with an artistic awareness . . .
Taken between 2009 and 2010, the photographs came about from four flights on two separate trips. Most of the shots were taken in the Makgadikgadi Pans, one of the world’s largest salt flats, and a place with nearly no plant life, but a bluish-green algae. Some of the photos were also taken in Botswana, in southern Africa, where there are large numbers of wildebeest, zebras and flamingos.
Most of the photographs in the Botswana series were taken from an ultra-light aircraft, while some taken from a Cessna, a slightly heavier small aircraft, allowing Seckler to shoot from a narrow band of about 50 to 500 feet–too high to be seen from the ground, but far lower than most aircraft normally fly.
“Within the first few minutes of being up there, I was just completely blown away,” he says. “Being in that airspace, you’re really seeing the world from a perspective that only birds see. Obviously no human on the ground can see that, and the big jumbo jets up above don’t fly that low. So it’s kind of this hidden airspace to the human eye, and it just immediately struck me as a really powerful visual.”
What resulted were stunning aerial photographs that have an abstract quality to them, showcasing the breathtakingly beautiful world we live in. In the words of the artist, “For me it was capturing a really unique vision of our world, a beautiful landscape from a unique perspective, and framing moments that create interesting contrast between living things, whether they be animals or flora, and the earth itself.”
