126-133 Chris Boyer Su06

Pilot Chris Boyer’s aerial photography shows the way we use our land. By Scott McMillion

hris Boyer has a thing about junkyards. Flying at low elevation across Montana, you or I would likely dwell on the prairie undulations or jagged riverine breaks, the erose peaks or that great big sky we’ve entered. Boyer marvels at all that, too. But he also focuses on the junk, the atolls of our discards that speckle the land. He takes special interest in these monuments to our ethic of disposal and replacement, miniscapes that, if left alone, will disappear only at the speed of rust.

Bridger Ridge, Chris Boyer, Lima Bay.

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When Chris Boyer sees a junk pile, chances are he’ll bank his plane and move in for a better look, observe its shapes, see how it fits into the landscape, and document what he sees with his cameras. “I just can’t stay away from them,” he said of our collections of abandoned things. Then he showed me a picture. It was a map of Montana, cast in busted Pontiacs, decrepit Chryslers and pickups torn apart in the kind of night people try to forget. Look closely at this map and you see, right where the city of Great Falls ought to be, what looks like a U-Haul truck. Its life played out under the steerage of strangers, it now awaits scavengers looking for Top: Fort Benton, Blue Pool.

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a cheap carburetor, an axle that’s maybe not too bent. It was an accident, Boyer said, the making of this picture. He’d spotted a wrecking yard near Silver Star—which is an awful pretty place—lying alongside the Jefferson River in the morning shadows of the Tobacco Root Mountains. Clearly, there’s a lot to look at around there, but it was the junk that caught his eye. So he flew over it, pressing his shutter release as he passed, hoping for good results. Later, processing his images, he liked them enough to print some postcards from them. When he took one to the post office, the clerk glanced at it upside down and said, “Oh. It’s a map of Montana.” Top: Eight Cars, Car Map.

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Boyer, in the air, was drawn by colors and shapes and his own curiosity.

Left: Cowboys. Above: Combining.

“I hadn’t seen it,” Boyer said. But there it was: an outline of the state in rusting steel and tarnished chrome, the crest of the Rockies clearly defined, the Idaho border carved by whitewater, even Highway 2 reaching flat and straight from Glacier Park to Culbertson. Boyer had printed the photo because he liked the way it looked, and he’d studied it for some time, but not from the proper angle. The story of that photo tells us something about how perspective accumulates upon itself. The junkyard is somebody’s place of business and the wreckage was placed for some grounded reason other than mapmaking. Boyer, in the air, was drawn by colors and shapes and his own curiosity. But it took a friendly postal clerk to spot Montana in the image. Viewers, like you and I, now can make of it what we will: mere amusement, an odd coincidence of shape and form, or a statement on the condition of Montana. The way Boyer describes his work, many of his best photos are happy accidents, though I suspect that, like the rest of us, the harder he works, the luckier he gets. Boyer takes two kinds of photos: oblique and vertical. The oblique shots are taken with a handheld camera pointed out his airplane window. His vertical ones are more difficult, since the camera is mounted in the belly of his cherry-red 1957 Cessna, and he has no viewfinder to help compose his pictures. When he sees something he wants to shoot, he flies over it, thumb on the button of his shutter release cable, and hopes for the best. “It’s kind of like an old fashioned bombing run,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I get one striking abstract or creative image per flight.” Aerial photography is not a new thing. Pilots have been snapping pictures for as long as they’ve had airplanes and, over time, it’s evolved into a science. Big airplanes with precise calibrations take

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Red Rock River.

aerial shots critical to mapmakers, urban planners and the military. Boyer, 42, does this more technical work, and it is good and valuable for people who design highways and trout streams. But he is also doing something altogether different, an approach that illustrates the human use of landscape. The results can be almost magical. One shot offers particular mysteries. It shows a collection of clotted things, but what is it? Ice in a mud puddle? Some foulness in a petri dish? It’s none of those. It’s merely ice forming in a reservoir near Harrison, spreading outward from the shallow spots in the five-acre pool. But when Boyer presents the image, it’s a splendid puzzle until you look at the title. “That’s the abstract element of the vertical,” Boyer

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explained. “It’s beyond mapmaking.” Boyer grew up on the East Coast and attended Vassar College, which he described as a place “highly favorable to a young straight guy.” But he spent his summers on a Wyoming dude ranch where, as a young man, he started thinking about the interaction between 20th century human life and the wild places that remain. He wrote his senior thesis on recreational development in the modern West. Then he attended graduate school at Oregon State University, where he learned to fly in a student program, and then settled in Bozeman, where he went to work doing stream restorations and eventually started his own company. Now, his business is in the air, where he takes a real close look at what we do to landscapes. His most famous photograph is of the Red Rock River

Boyer’s work makes you think about what we do to the West and what it does to us. sidewinding through the Centennial Valley, perhaps the least touched of Montana’s big valleys. The picture looks like a desert landscape, a foreground composed of sunshine and bare, red earth. But the ground is exposed because sooner or later it won’t be. The photo shows the belly of a reservoir shriveled by drought; a place people covered with deep water so they could then alter downstream landscapes. It’s a stunningly beautiful shot, but it’s a manufactured landscape, like so much of our world. Boyer’s work makes you think about what we do to the West and what it does to us. A ridgetop trophy home consumes more than the ground beneath it: It claims the viewshed all around for its owner. From the air, urban Butte sparkles with a cleanliness you don’t see at ground level, and the toxic waters in the bottom of a mine pit shine like a buffed-up robin’s egg.

Cow paths and construction sites, overgrazed pastures, ripened fields and the leapfrog sprawl that accommodates Bozeman’s middle class. A mountain of tires tucked into a coulee. The junkyards you can find behind most ranch houses. The turned-up prairies that provide our bread and noodles and beer. Boyer documents it all. And while the work offers no judgments, it’s clearly about us—all of us—our tastes and habits, our garbage and monuments, the things we create and destroy with our opposable thumbs. We’re here for the long haul, the work tells us. We’re not going away. Boyer, with his airplane and his camera, gives us a new way to think about what kind of marks we leave. Chris Boyer’s aerial photography can be seen on his Web site at www.kestrelaerial.com BSJ

Circle 85 on Reader Service Card

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