Stunning aerial photographs of a daredevil pilot in World War I

After surviving nine crash landings, pilot Alfred Packham created some of the earliest and most impressive photographs taken from the sky. To achieve these goals, he risked his life, using risky, death-defying feats of ingenuity.

“What scenes of grandeur and beauty!” Thomas Baldwin, in his 1786 novel Airopaydia, told of a balloon flight over Chester during which he created one of the earliest aerial drawings. Everything was “presented in a way that was new to the eye…the imagination…overwhelmed.” Today, we take aerial views for granted. The advent of drones has made amateur aerial photography popular, while tools like Google Earth provide sweeping views in seconds. However, in the Victorian era, aerial photographs were the result of extraordinary feats of ingenuity that included hot air balloons, pigeons, and even rockets.

Collection of Richard and John Packham

But an exciting new way to take to the skies was just around the corner, as goggles were worn in the first forays into aviation. This emerging industry, coupled with the outbreak of World War I – in which mapping and intelligence gathering became a crucial task – presented radically new possibilities for aerial photography. One notable pioneer was the brave World War I pilot Alfred Packham (1879-1956), who was an irrepressible risk-taker who survived nine crash landings. Although the last one resulted in a serious throat injury that required a laryngectomy and his voice lowered to a whisper, he continued to take to the air, combining his love of flying with his passion for photography, leaning dangerously out of planes to capture some of the oldest and most stunning aerial photographs in history.

His death-defying photographs are the subject of a major new exhibition, Alfred Packham: Photographer of Daredevil, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The exhibition shares Packham’s evocative perspective on landmarks in Britain and the Americas, from the sun-filled Thames course in the Heart of Empire (1923), on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, to newly completed landmarks such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, both of which were photographed for Fortune magazine during a series of flights in 1931 of record length. More than 100 photographs and objects are on display, including Packham’s letters, passport and camera – all telling the story, voiced by his grandson Richard, of his crazy aerial adventures and innovative post-production processes.