Marilyn Bridges

Last updated
Marilyn Bridges
Marilyn Bridges 2003 BW.jpeg
Marilyn Bridges, 2003
Born1948
Nationality American
Education Rochester Institute of Technology
Known forAerial photography
Website www.marilynbridges.com

Marilyn Christine Bridges (born 1948) is an American photographer noted for her fine art black and white aerial photographs of extraordinary ancient and modern landscapes. She has photographed sacred and secular sites in over 20 countries, including Peru, Mexico, France, Britain, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Australia, Namibia, Indonesia and India. [1] Bridges is a licensed pilot and a Fellow of the Explorers Club. She lives in New York.

Contents

Bridges' work has been exhibited in over 300 museums and galleries, including solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Moscow House of Photography in Russia, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the International Center of Photography in New York. [1] Museums with extensive collections of her work include the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, [2] the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and the Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi in Belgium. [1] Her photographs have been published in major magazines, including Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, Time, Life, Archaeology, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine. [1] She is the author of eight books.

Biography

Marilyn Bridges studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1979) and a Master of Fine Arts (1981). [3]

She began her career in aerial photography in 1976 in the Peruvian desert. [4] Bridges hired a small airplane to fly over the mysterious Nazca Lines, the largest concentration of earth drawings in the world. [5] “At RIT she printed her Peruvian negatives as her first school project. Her technique was not yet polished, but the deep shadows, the eloquent light, and sense of time standing unnaturally still were present in every print. Bridges already had her style ... Cornell Capa, the dean of American photography, saw her work, admired it, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York gave her an exhibition.” [3]

In 1982, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bridges flew in a small single-engine Cessna from New York to the Yucatán, where she photographed ancient Mayan sites, some still partially overgrown by the dense jungle. [3] Many of these photographs appeared in her 1986 book Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes, which also includes photographs of Nazca, Native American archaeological sites, and megalithic monuments in Britain and Brittany. Bridges returned to Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship and published many of the resulting photographs in her 1991 book Planet Peru: An Aerial Journey Through a Timeless Land. In Egypt in 1993-94 she obtained unusual permission to fly over the Valley of the Kings and along the Nile. Leaning out of an old Russian military helicopter, she photographed dozens of ancient sites. [5] The result was a unique collection of aerial photographs in her 1996 book Egypt: Antiquities from Above. Closer to home Bridges photographed ancient and contemporary sites across the United States, from Pre-Columbian mounds in the Midwest and geoglyphs in California, to lava flows in Hawaii and glaciers in Alaska. Many of these photographs are in her 1997 book This Land is Your Land: Across America by Air. Bridges also received a grant from the French government to make aerial photographs of historical and contemporary sites in the Calais region to document the changing environment in connection with the Channel Tunnel, as seen in her 1995 book Vue d’Oiseau. She received a similar grant from the Belgian government to document the landscape of Wallonia from the air, resulting in the 1999 book Vol au-dessus de la Wallonie. Both collections of photographs appeared in solo exhibitions in major museums throughout Europe. She has also photographed the ruins of classical cities and temples in Greece and Turkey. [6] In 2009, she flew over Minoan sites in Crete, and the Onassis Foundation exhibited these photographs in New York City. [7]

Bridges uses a medium format film camera, and takes photographs from a small airplane or helicopter with the door removed, usually from an altitude of 300 to 1000 feet. Her photographic prints are silver gelatin, and selenium toned. [3]

Awards and honors

Publications

Reviews and commentaries

"Aside from their documentary value, the photographs are beautiful in themselves, taken with an artist’s eye for shapes and patterns." – Grace Glueck, New York Times [9]

"Her work combines an exquisite sense of composition and form with an appreciation of the cultural significance of the subjects she photographs." – Craig Morris, Dean of Science, American Museum of Natural History [10]

Marilyn Bridges’ aerial photographs . . . testify to an irresistible combination of artistry, technical competence and gung-ho tenacity. – Jane Richards, The Independent (UK) [11]

Marilyn Bridges, photographer, pilot and explorer, illuminates the bonds between the mark-makers of 3000 BC and the builders of our modern cities. Ancient or contemporary, Bridges’ landscapes serve the dual role of interpreting the power of extraordinary sites and creating visual records that may prove to be the only means of preserving these sites against the eroding elements of time and neglect. Bridges' work itself is about time, both geological and human. – Willis Hartshorn, Director, International Center of Photography [12]

For me, there's no other way to understand her photography without comprehending her continual hunt for secrets and mysteries. For her, the face of the earth is one glyph after another shrouded in shadows to be exposed and interpreted . . . Indeed, her hallmark is shadow, the sharp delineation of absent light. One could easily turn the etymology of photograph on its ear and call a Bridges aerial landscape an umbragraph, where darkness explains things – or at least exposes them – far more comprehensively than light does. – William Least Heat-Moon, author of Blue Highways [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nazca Lines</span> Geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert, Peru

The Nazca Lines are a group of geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BCE and 500 CE by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving differently colored dirt exposed. There are two major phases of the Nazca lines, Paracas phase, from 400 to 200 BCE, and Nazca phase, from 200 BCE to 500 CE. In the years leading up to 2020, between 80 and 100 new figures had been found with the use of drones, and archaeologists believe that there are more to be found.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josef Koudelka</span> Czech–French photographer

Josef Koudelka is a Czech-French photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and has won awards such as the Prix Nadar (1978), a Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), a Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nazca culture</span>

The Nazca culture was the archaeological culture that flourished from c. 100 BC to 800 AD beside the arid, southern coast of Peru in the river valleys of the Rio Grande de Nazca drainage and the Ica Valley. Strongly influenced by the preceding Paracas culture, which was known for extremely complex textiles, the Nazca produced an array of crafts and technologies such as ceramics, textiles, and geoglyphs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augustus Le Plongeon</span> British photographer and archaeologist (1825–1908)

Augustus Henry Julian Le Plongeon was a British-American archeologist and photographer who studied the pre-Columbian ruins of America, particularly those of the Maya civilization on the northern Yucatán Peninsula. While his writings contain many notions that were not well received by his contemporaries and were later disproven, Le Plongeon left a lasting legacy in his photographs documenting the ancient ruins. He was one of the earliest proponents of Mayanism.

Gilles Peress is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johan Reinhard</span> American anthropologist

Johan Reinhard is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He is also a senior research fellow at The Mountain Institute, a visiting professor at Catholic University, Salta, Argentina, an honorary professor of Catholic University, Arequipa, Peru, and a research professor at Future Generations University.

Lynn Davis is an American photographer known for her large-scale black-and-white photographs which are widely collected publicly and privately and are internationally exhibited.

Paul August Kosok, was an American professor of history and government, who is credited as the first serious researcher of the Nazca Lines in Peru. His work on the lines started in 1939, when he was doing field study related to the irrigation systems of ancient cultures. By the 1950s, he had completed extensive mapping of more than 300 ancient canals in Peru, in collaboration with archeologist Richard P. Schaedel. Kosok demonstrated the culture's sophisticated management of water to support their settlements.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg is a German photographer and artist known for the conceptual series photographs. She lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.

Remote sensing techniques in archaeology are an increasingly important component of the technical and methodological tool set available in archaeological research. The use of remote sensing techniques allows archaeologists to uncover unique data that is unobtainable using traditional archaeological excavation techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penelope Umbrico</span> American artist (born 1957)

Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.

Diana Lui is a Franco-Belgian artist, photographer and filmmaker of Chinese origin. Diana Lui is best known for her large format photographic portraits of today's growing hybrid generation of multicultural and multiethnic individuals.

Alessandra Sanguinetti is an American photographer. A number of her works have been published and she is a member of Magnum Photos. She has received multiple awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaToya Ruby Frazier</span>

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary traditional of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systemic problems, from racism to deindustrialization to environmental degradation, on individual bodies, relationships and spaces. In her work, she is concerned with bringing to light these problems, which she describes as global issues.

Charlotte Cotton is a curator of and writer about photography.

Terry Evans is an American photographer. After growing up in Kansas City, she moved to Salina, Kansas, where she was inspired to explore the themes of human relationship with the land. Evans' work explores the environmental impact of humans on the landscape in the American Midwest and is notable for aerial perspective photos of prairies. Her work has been collected by several Museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in photography.

Marilyn Nance, also known as Soulsista, is an American multimedia artist known for work focusing on exploring human connections, African-American spirituality, and the use of technology in storytelling.

Diane Tuft is an American photographer focusing on nature and landscape photography, documenting the effects of the environment on the Earth's landscape. She is based in New York City.

Kristin Capp is an American photographer, author and educator. Capp's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work is included in collections at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Harvard Art Museum. She was one of sixty international artists selected for the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2017. Her work has appeared in the Bursa International Photofest in Turkey, as well as in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany and the United States.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Marilyn Bridges Photography
  2. ↑ "Marilyn Bridges | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Goldberg, Vicki (November/December 1991). “An intimacy with the land: The aerial photography of Marilyn Bridges". Archaeology 44(6), pg 32-39.
  4. ↑ Foerstner, Abigail (January 3, 1992). “Pictures of sacred places let us glimpse the unseen”. Chicago Tribune
  5. 1 2 Liebenson, Bess (September 14, 1997). “The play of light among monuments of ancient Egypt”. New York Times
  6. ↑ Buckland, Gail (Winter 2006). “Marilyn Bridges: Flights over ancient Anatolia”. Aperture, no. 185.
  7. ↑ Bouzali, Leda (July 2008). “Minoan Crete from above: Marilyn Bridges’ aerial photography exhibition in New York City”. ΑΩ International, Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
  8. ↑ "Marilyn Bridges - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". archive.is. 14 April 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-04-14.
  9. ↑ Glueck, Grace (February 5, 1982). “Peru’s Nazca lines as seen from the air”. New York Times
  10. ↑ Morris, Craig (December 1995). “Airborne archaeology”. Natural History, vol. 104, pg 70-72.
  11. ↑ Richards, Jane (May 17, 1994). “Inside the temple of zoom: Marilyn Bridges hangs from low-flying plane to take aerial pictures of archaeological sites”. The Independent.
  12. ↑ Hartshorn, Willis. International Center of Photography, Collections, Marilyn Bridges
  13. ↑ Least Heat-Moon, William (1997). “Shadows on the American landscape: The photography of Marilyn Bridges”. In: Bridges, Marilyn, This Land is Your Land: Across America by Air.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.