The Other Photos

David Bixby, Missoula, Montana       April 4, 2000

While many KAPers pursue their art in quest of that perfect shot. I have found great enjoyment in another aspect of the endeavor. I too am thrilled when the perfect shot of a perfect subject crosses my camera’s film/CCD. But there is another aspect to the hobby that I find thoroughly enjoying. It is the amassing of many “pretty good” shots of subjects that range from the mundane to the spectacular. Taken together my collection of shots becomes a special entity in itself.

As I look through a page of my photos, eyes jumping from one scene to the next, I get the feeling that I am riding aboard some sort of alien probe. Each shot is taken from just the height one might choose if they were planning a mission to examine the Earth and its human inhabitants. The perfect height from which to look but not touch. I feel a compulsion to beam up the little people in some of the photos and give them a quick look at their world from my space ship.

Once enough photos have been compiled from one particular town or area, a sequence can be created that takes the viewer on a low flyby.

The photos become a network of visions that allow the photographer and his/her audience to soar over a location in any direction they wish. The photographer can begin to inhabit that space just a few hundred feet above daily life.

KAP is a form of remote sensing that is not duplicated by any other technology. Aircraft rarely fly as low. Satellite images are no comparison. KAPers collect visual data about the Earth and civilization that is not available by any other means. Sure, a cherry picker or helicopter could reproduce just about any particular KAP image, but the body of KAP images taken collectively represents a unique and culturally significant data set about our world.

I consider myself a beginner at KAP, and I have only a few of those “perfect” shots under my belt, but already, I am planning to take all of those other photos and create pieces of art with them. I will compile them into albums that when taken as a unit produce a vision of life on Earth in my town in the end of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of my kite space probe. Because KAP is practiced by so few, my albums will be rare and special.