In this discussion of long gradients, I’ve been talking about “compression” in spatial terms—photographically representing continent-scale vegetation patterns within the space of a few feet of wall. But this compression is essentially about time rather than space—the many hours needed to experience the real-life gradient by vehicle versus viewing a photographic transect in the “space” of a few seconds or minutes. And as I mentioned in my introductory post on the topic, even the car trip version, if relatively speedy and uninterrupted, can have a miniaturizing effect, needless to say compared to doing it over weeks on foot. I sometimes wonder if, when cars and trains first came about, the average person found this to be one exciting aspect of the new technology. (I’m sure geography- and botany-minded people did.)
Airborne
This idea of compression-through-speed might also raise the question of why flying (at least for me) doesn’t produce an even stronger compressing effect than driving. I think flying does give most of us a surreal, world-shrinking feeling in the sense of going to sleep over one continent and waking up over another. But I’m referring more specifically to what’s happening on the ground in-between—it isn’t the same as theoretically traveling by land at the speed of a plane. But, going back to photo-representation, what about a transect from photos taken from a plane, requiring many fewer images than if shot from a car? Or, for that matter, satellite views like those of the central U.S. that I posted earlier? Those visuals would be lacking something too, for the same reason my worldviews nowadays are fractured into landscape and aerial perspectives rather than just the latter: The compressing, empowering effect depends greatly on an earthbound, immersive experience. Detachment from the ground changes it qualitatively.
But having said that, I’d guess that early astronauts’ captivation by their first views of earth from space was not just a new realization of the planet’s fragility but a feeling of omniscience—“complete knowing.” (As I’ve talked about, my worldviews actually grow out of both those feelings.) An airplane, despite affording a much narrower view of the earth moment-to-moment, does provide some degree of that omniscience; at the same time it remains relatively “earth-bound” in comparison to a spacecraft, plus more closely bound to the typical human experience. All this has been in my mind for a long time, and so on a cloudless flight from D.C. to San Francisco in 2016, somewhere over Kansas it occurred to me to attempt a photo-transect from the air. For the remaining three hours I took a picture every two minutes, an interval that left no gaps and produced only a small amount of overlap between views.
The flight path and photo locations, produced in Lightroom. Each number on the orange rectangles represents the number of photos taken near that spot (they’re grouped together only because I’m zoomed far out).
The photographic transect (from upper left to lower right) along the flight path in the map above. If I hadn’t made this for screen viewing I would’ve arranged them in a single row—or maybe, now that I’m seeing it, the stacking doesn’t necessarily muddle the effect?
The clouds did mostly stay away for the rest of the flight, but given the iffy lighting and the fact that I started the project already halfway across the country, the result turned out to be of limited value in terms of capturing the wet-dry gradient. Yet I think it’s effective just in showing how many images like this it takes to seamlessly cover half the country, and there is a compressing effect in that being fewer than I would’ve expected. The lack of gaps between images does in one way give it more impact than any remotely practical earthbound transect could. And, again, it beats even a single, seamless view from space because of that closer connection to earthly experience. If I ever manage to end up on another daytime, cloudless, trans-continental flight with a window seat away from the wing and a better phone camera, I might try it again.
There could be a few ways of splitting the difference between slow-and-earthbound and fast-and-airborne, in terms of the real-life experience of traveling the gradient as well as a photographic transect that you could create from that journey. One is high-speed rail, which I haven’t ridden in years but can imagine could be the best of both worlds (maybe across China, which has a similar forest-to-desert gradient as the U.S.). Another comes from a documentary I saw when I was young about the “African Flying Boat”—a low-flying plane used by the British Empire to link its colonies. My memory’s probably distorted but I recall that it flew just above the treetops. There are probably good reasons why it isn’t still around, but I remember being entranced.
Animated
So, there are factors other than speed—particularly “groundedness”—important in creating a compressed experience of gradients whether out in the real world or through some form of representation. But in terms of representation, the issue of temporal vs. spatial compression brings up a second question: instead of a hard-to-display photographic transect, why not a video? I think the answer is that, even though a photo-transect on the wall would still take some amount of time to take in, video is by definition a time-based medium no matter how long it runs. Theoretically a photo-transect could be absorbed in an instant, depending on how far back you’re standing. My mental image of a thousand-mile distance being compressed and then “laid out” spatially is much more powerful than a sped-up version of traveling that actual distance. (It reminds me of another image, stuck in my head from A Thread Across the Sea by John Steele Gordon—1,000 or so miles of future trans-Atlantic cable coiled up—compressed, in its own way—in the hull of a ship.) But a video could be much more practical to display, and even though temporal duration is a problem regardless of what that duration is, you can always try speeding it up. So I decided to give this a try too, though in this case along a short gradient: rainforest to alpine desert on the first half of my 2011 Kilimanjaro ascent (7,700’ to 13,500’).
This 2.5 min. video from my Kilimanjaro climb (the Lemosho Route) is really an animated photographic transect—a succession of still photos (taken at about every 50’ of elevation gain) laid out in time rather than in space. Shooting continuous video would’ve been barely possible, not to mention a bad way to experience the climb. Plus, along a short, elevational gradient, variations in slope mean that continuous shooting wouldn’t accurately capture vegetation changing in response to elevation.
For a long gradient the frame interval would be based on distance rather than elevation—definitely a much larger distance than the average distance covered between each of the frames in this animation, meaning that the total number of frames may or may not be larger.
I also made a second version of this video with much shorter frames—it’s basically a 17-second green-to-white blur.
The Kilimanjaro ascent, accelerated.
Though I might’ve gone overboard with the speed in this accelerated one, I do think it’s more effective than the slower version in encapsulating the gradient. But because of the aforementioned benefits of “laying it out,” of wanting viewers free to absorb it at their own speed, and of my interest in the challenge and novelty of making it legible, informative, and displayable, I still think the non-animated transect idea has more potential. Next time I’ll have some final thoughts on possibly where and how, for long gradients.
Darren