Cris Benton: Seductive images of a landscape in transition

Cargill crystallizers: this view shows two crystallizer beds during harvest season. The upper bed has been drained and displays the tracks left by the harvesting machinery as it gathered salt. The lower bed awaits harvest with a load of magenta pickle that will soon be drained. Photo by Cris Benton, published in his new book,Saltscapes.

Cris Benton, a retired professor of architecture and former department chairat UC Berkeley, recentlypublishedSaltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton(Heyday Books, 2013), whichprovides a fascinating, and beautiful insight into the salt evaporation ponds of the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay. The photographs are taken using a kite and radio-controlled camera, a technique Benton pioneered in the early 1980s. Berkeleyside talked toBenton whose work has been shown at the Oakland Museum of California, the Exploratorium, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum among others about the story behind the images, as well as some of the joys and hazards of kite aerial photography.

Can you tell us how and when you started this type of photography?

I started my kite aerial photography (KAP) in 1984. The idea sprang from a confluence of photography and radio-controlled sailplanes, two of my favorite pastimes. I often flew my sailplanes down at Cesar Chavez Park where there is a fine community of kite fliers. While flying my planes one afternoon I bumped into Anne Rock, a Berkeley resident who talked about using kites to raise cameras. Having previously considered mounting a camera on one of my planes the kite idea struck me as brilliant since kites tend to be a stable, self-tending platform.

I spent a few years sorting out how to fly kites, mount the camera, compose the photographs, and keep my lofted gear from crashing. There was a middle period during which I travelled broadly with my KAP gear in a continual quest for aerial images compositionally worthy of display. I am now well settled into my third period, use of the technique in sustained studies of specific landscapes.

This bleached white skeleton is a former bush that died when a small salt pond at the north end of the Coyote Hills was connected to tidal flow via a culvert. The crackled ground texture surrounding the skeleton is a harbinger of greater change associated with the new tidal regime. Photo, by Cris Benton, published in his new book,Saltscapes.

What do you like about the images that you create with kitephotography?

I was pretty much seduced by my earliest results. Here were intimate, low-altitude aerial views of the very landscape I had just occupied as a photographer. As architects we are trained to think about relationships and juxtapositions in the built environment think birds eye perspectives. The kite provided a graceful, economical means to achieve these novel views. And the views could be quite surprising.

My radio can pan and tilt the camera, switch between portrait and landscape formats, and fire the shutter. I compose the images by watching the camera as it floats above and forming a mental picture of what it would see. Comparing this imagined view to the actual photographs is always a learning experience. Interesting details otherwise unseen the tracks of animals across Bolinas Ridge or the Spengers Restaurant roofscape emerge as discoveries that contribute to a sense of place.

Homage to Rothko. This shallow mud levee separates a distribution channel containing Bay water from a former salt pond loaded with a substantial amount of residual salt. As the summer season progresses, the rains of winter evaporate from inactive ponds, salinity increases, and different halophiles prosperPhoto by Cris Benton, published in his new book,Saltscapes.

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Cris Benton: Seductive images of a landscape in transition