Bill Walterman’s From the Air: A Different Perspective of East Texas

Some years ago, I came across Andrew Moore’s book “Dirt Meridian”. I was familiar with aerial photographs shot from tens of thousands of feet. They showed the earth as amorphous blobs of color, interesting, but not my cup of tea. Andrew Moore, however, photographed the Great Plains from a light plane at one thousand feet or so. I was fascinated. His lower altitude photographs were more detailed, more immediate.  

Inspired, I longed to shoot from the air myself, but my budget didn’t permit an airplane. Then came along drones and I soon had one of my own.  

For years I had photographed East Texas and its people, places, and things with both my feet planted firmly on the ground. Now I could explore East Texas from above. As before, I focused on small towns and the landscapes. I soon learned that the perspective from 100 to 300 feet is not just a novelty, it offered a new, almost magical, perspective to East Texas.   

Then one day while photographing Navasota, Texas almost by accident I pointed my drone’s lens straight down at a main street intersection and the resulting image amazed me. Traffic signals, lane markers, directional arrows, vehicles, buildings - all were still recognizable - but from 100 feet or so up, the image was almost abstract.  I was hooked and from then on, I looked for more & more almost abstracts.  

My friend and fellow photographer, Terri Golas, says the “love of abstraction is less about escaping reality and more about transforming and reinterpreting it. You’re not seeking to leave the world behind but rather to reframe it and blur the lines between the tangible and imagination.  It’s about finding beauty in ambiguity and seeing beyond the obvious… where the abstraction is in the seeing.”