Wild Machines over Dubai

Sixty-one years ago this week, an airplane made flights over Dubai. A specially built aerial camera, mounted to the plane’s floor and aimed at Earth below, zoomed in to capture every knot of a sandbar in Dubai Creek, every palm on every farm, and every courtyard of every coral house; it could sense the faintest of trails from 3,600 meters high. Weeks passed before the film made it to the offices of Hunting Surveys in southern Hertfordshire. There, technicians submitted the images to photogrammetry—warping and stretching them to agree with on-the-ground recorded distances. The result was “a synoptic view of the ground.” Dubai’s hustle, normally played out daily and unpredictably in three dimensions, was now clamped down, silent, in two dimensions.

The survey—an “aerotriangulation and mapping at 1/2000 scale by precise photogrammetric methods”—marked an uncannily legible datum. From it, Dubai would be measured. It was the most accurate recording of Dubai, but it was months out of date before anyone saw it. Perhaps as late as April, the architect John Harris received his copy, on top of which his office drew Dubai’s first town plan.

It won’t surprise anyone that the aerial imaging company Hunting Surveys came about from a swirl of architecture, military strategy, and the entertainment industry. Co-founder Francis Wills was educated as an architect, his earned skills leading to his assignment to photographic surveillance during World War I. After the war, he didn’t return to architecture; instead, he invested his wartime contribution in the filmmaking business, to shoot aerial scenes for movie productions. (He’s on the left in this image.) In 1938, in an effort to expand the company’s services, Wills traveled to Switzerland to purchase a Wild Heerbrugg A5 stereoautograph.

It wasn’t long before his big, expensive Swiss machine got drafted for World War II service and proved its value by identifying, accurately enough, the location of German missile launch sites. In the image above, the Wild A5 is at work at a Royal Air Force site. The seated man is peering through not only the magnifying lenses of a microscope, but also other lenses designed to negate various sorts of visual distortion. Distortion to counter distortion. In some mechanical way, the technician could order the stereoplotter, to his left, to “trace” what he saw through the viewer.

Mapping Dubai constituted sequences of distancing: without seeing Dubai or even touching the final sheet of paper, a technician processed altitudinal views through long-form mathematical equations—all done to instruct a mechanical arm to draft an impossible, godlike view.

It is easy to associate aerial photography, and photogrammetry, with omniscient control. In fact, the word control appears, on its own, in their everyday practice. Analysts seek “horizontal control,” “azimuth control,” “vertical control,” “total control,” and a “control network” imagined to blanket the planet. Francis Wills’s colleagues called him Daddy.

Dubai came under such control when aerial photographs still depended on geographical triangulation completed by an army of engineers, footmen, cooks, administrators, and beasts of burden who moved across a targeted landscape to prepare it for photographing. Not unlike the ancient Greeks with their gnomons, and the ancient Egyptians who erected obelisks to measure the relation between the stars and the Nile, a grid of pipes (“driven into the dune to a depth of 10 m, or until refusal”) had to be planted. “The difference is in accuracy,” is the way a Hunting surveyor distinguished his work from that of the ancients. Another difference: Hunting’s explicit ambition to control the planet. Geodetic control, it was called.

The earliest Western record of mapping the Arabian Peninsula, from the Gulf to the Red Sea, is from 1819, the same year that British naval forces attacked shores near Dubai. (Once again, it’s not difficult to make a connection between militants and adventurers.) After World War II, oil companies hired adventurers at Hunting Survey to produce accurate aerials of the Arabian Peninsula for their prospecting.

Once Hunting got it back after the war, the Wild A5 was set up in an office kitchen. Soon it was flattening Kuwait, and then Qatar, into map views. In 1952, as a result of those oil agreements, Hunting got its first contract to map a Gulf city, Kuwait. Resulting photography was used to produce a precisely scaled master plan, which also was a guide to overseeing demolition of nearly the entire existing city. In 1960, Hunting arrived in Dubai after an assignment in Doha, and during the same trip when it photographed Dubai, it captured Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and Ras Al Khaimah. Hunting became a global company with a dedicated room for each of its Wild machines: the UK Room, the Hong Kong Room, and the Overseas Room.

After 1960, Hunting Surveys was often summoned to rephotograph Dubai, all the while spreading and densifying its triangulated web around the world. By 1975, there were “only a few gaps [that] remain totally uncontrolled” in the Arabian Peninsula. One of Dubai’s earliest promotional brochures featured an image taken during a subsequent recording of Dubai. It demonstrated that the government had laid tarmac roads. Through the 1970s, Dubai officials only hired Hunting to provide the photographic evidence. Aerial images, more than any processed photogrammetric map, was the proof that Dubai existed. And by the early 2000s, aerial photography celebrated fanciful forms being inscribed on land and water, in the shapes of palms. Hunting Surveys closed in 2006, but the sky views persisted. Aerial imagery was soon animated in stop-motion to reveal a city, even whose contours did not stay the same. Land shaped like planets and poetry written on land were to be next. Around 2010, the major developer Nakheel circulated its own aerial of Dubai, seemingly a result of old-fashioned aerial photomosaics but really a quick job on Photoshop. Proposed projects were sewn into the existing landscape. The future presented as history.

In February 2014, the Government of Dubai staged a photo op. Dubai’s leadership watched a drone lift up from the carpeted floor of a lobby; a press release announced that Dubai prepared to welcome drones to everyday life. “We want to reach to people before they reach us,” was a circulated quip. Western news outlets, like CNN and Wired, picked up the story. No one thought to mention that the hovering drone was probably just an inexpensive model picked up at Dragon Mart. “Technological realities seldom intrude on popular faith in drones,” Andrew Cockburn recently wrote in the London Review of Books about the public’s fascination with the machines. The faith in the accuracy of whatever we put in the skies, he explains, goes back centuries, and includes precision missiles as well as precision planning. The reality, though, constantly disappoints.

“Mapping is an unending task,” the Hunting surveyor once warned. A photograph captures time, not space. Time goes by. Hunting’s small plane, outfitted with a hole in its belly for an analogue camera, does not return any longer to mark Dubai’s progress. Countless satellites revolving around the earth will now, with the press of a button, capture time on demand. The images get transformed by the same equations employed sixty-one years ago, only now completed almost simultaneously by computers. All the more quickly, then, they are filed as views distorted many times over—a slippery, seductive archive of the past.

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This is the sixth dispatch to celebrate the release of Showpiece City. You can read the first five: Telephones & Dynamite, A Season of Migrations, West, A Circumscribed World, Gathering at a Roundabout, and John Harris Comes to Dubai.