Bahia from the air

Twelve of the twenty-six Brazilian prints on this site come from one stretch of coast. Not because Bahia is the only place worth flying, but because it is unusually generous to the aerial view — and the aerial view is unusually demanding.

What the height actually changes

From the ground, a beach is a place you are standing in. You read it through what is nearest: the sand under you, the person ahead, the line of the water. From two hundred metres up, none of that is available. The subject stops being the thing in front of the lens and becomes the pattern — where the river silts into the sea, how the palms crowd to the edge of the cliff and then stop, the exact curve a sandbar takes when the tide has finished with it.

That is a harder photograph to make and an easier one to look at for a long time. It is also why these images hold up printed large. There is no single point of focus competing for your attention; the whole frame is the subject.

The cliffs

The crimson cliffs and the clay cliffs are the same geology at different hours. Bahia's falésias are soft rock, iron-rich, and they read as almost artificially saturated from above — the kind of colour that looks pushed in a photograph and simply isn't. Falésias da Bahia is the wide version of the same coast.

These are the prints people ask about most, and the ones I would put largest. At 61×91 cm the strata become legible as strata rather than texture.

Where the water changes its mind

Onde o Rio Encontra o Mar is the one image here that only exists from the air. On the ground it is a river mouth. From above it is two different waters refusing to mix, with a visible seam between them.

Corumbau's sandbar works the same way — a shape that is only a shape from directly overhead. Stand on it and it is a walk.

Palms, which are harder than they look

Palms photograph badly from above more often than not. Shot flat they become green noise. O Palmeiral da Bahia, Palmeiras Selvagens and Palmeiras e Areia Dourada work for different reasons. Two of them have low sun and long shadows, so the canopy has depth instead of being a texture; the third is shot in flat overcast light, where the palms separate by colour rather than by shadow.

The quiet ones

Not everything here is a landscape. O Orelhão — a derelict payphone in the dunes, its turquoise shell flaking and painted over with rust-coloured stars, under a sky about to break — and the church at Trancoso are ground-level, and they are in the Bahia group because they belong to the same place rather than the same technique.

They tend to end up in different rooms than the aerials. The cliffs go over a sofa. The Orelhão goes somewhere you pass rather than sit.

Printing these

Every one of them is printed on Enhanced Matte Art 200gsm. The reason is specific to this kind of work and I have written about it separately — briefly, aerial images carry a lot of fine tonal gradation in sand and shallow water, and gloss destroys exactly that by adding its own reflections on top.

See all twenty-six Brazil prints, or the aerial work as a whole.