Kite Aerial Photography by Esteban Pastorino Díaz (May 31, 2010) 
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Introduction by Patricia Gouvea
Photographs feed me. Photographs transport me. Photographs leave a mark on me. Photographs open a gap in ordinary time or transform the ordinary in extraordinary.
This selection of photographic works does not have a master line: they constitute just one part of the images that in some moment aroused emotion in me and for that reason accompany me to these days. These are works from artists as different as their paths, reflections and challenges that each theme provoked, leading them to create methods, concepts and solutions to turn into matter what is born reverie.
Some projects look closer to documentation, like the trance funk Totoma! by Daniela Dacorso. Or the portraits of the domestic workers and their bosses, by the Slovenian Andrej Balco (who, after a period of time in Rio, escaped from the cliché poorness – violence, looking at the carioca middle class). Or, still, the Baixo Estácio by the very carioca A.C. Junior, where Samba is more silence than happiness.
Other projects point to gaps and small signs left on the skin of the urban tissue, that talk about love and pain, like the series Love Story, by Leonardo Ramadinha. And to enigmatic landscapes that could only exist in the mind of dreamers like the Argentine photographer Esteban Pastorino that, in the series K.A.P., turns into models places photographed from a kite fitted with a handmade camera. How not to be attentive also to the humorous and self-explicative Sobremim (About Me), by Isabela Lira? And to the Mexican Alfredo De Stéfano who, in his series Replenishing Emptiness, makes the desert a territory of the ephemeral, with his experiences of intimacy and relativization of nature?
Make these images yours, take them with you wherever you go, be attentive to the thickness of time that exists in each one of them. A more frenetic time or a more decelerated time, it doesn’t matter. Just stop and observe.
Next / Ironic Allusions To Our Relationship With The Desert / Previous / History Surrounds Us /
Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
I started working on this series in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001.
For many years before that I was involved in scale modelling and macro-photography as a hobby. These practices became the seeds of this series.
I wanted to create an ambiguous image that resembles the way we look at the scale models but which is actually a photograph of the real world.
The main technical points that I defined for that were: the apparent short deep of field in the images, and the high point of view from which the images would be taken.
The first effect is given by tilting the lens in relation to the film. For that I constructed a cardboard camera which has the lens in that position and fixed focus.
To reach a high point of view, I use a kite that lifts the camera between sixty and four hundred feet up into the air. The K.A.P. (kite aerial photography) technique was already used just a few years after the invention of photography and was giving amazing results even at that time. See for example Arthur Batut’s work, made in France between 1846 and 1918.
The process is controlled in many technical aspects but the final image is influenced by aspects that I can not control. Since it is impossible to see trough the view finder is also impossible to know exactly what the camera is photographing.
I emphasize that the aesthetic decisions are made at the moment of defining the mechanical aspects of the process and not under control at the moment of triggering the shutter.
Esteban Pastorino Díaz (1972) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Click weblink estebanpastorinodiaz.com or browse our archives
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Posted in category 653
Though I like these images very much – but…… surely these are in fact scale models photographed with a toy camera, rather than kite images?
The image of the airport just cannot be real – the planes are too close together and there is no runway.
If this is a joke, then I fell for it – and I still love the pictures, but I am left confused….
Alan
[...] existir na mente de sonhadores como o fotógrafo argentino Esteban Pastorino Díaz, que na série Kite Aerial Photography lança mão de uma pipa equipada com uma câmera feita à mão para fotografar os lugares [...]
[...] Foto: Esteban Pastorino. Da série Kite Aerial Photography [...]