As the first post in over 18 months, and the first post with text in about 2 years, I had imagined I would write about something other than this, but here we go.
On a recent trip to Bombay, I was excited to visit the exhibit of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "Earth From The Air" set up along Marine Drive. It was organised by Boujour India to celebrate Indo-French relations.
If you've never seen Arthus-Bertrand's "Earth From The Air" pictures, I highly recommend that you look for the exhibition or pick up the book. As an aside, for such gorgeous pictures, they have a terribly ugly and cluttered website.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. The last panel of the exhibition detailed the equipment Arthus-Bertrand used to take his amazing photos. Here is the photo of that panel.
If you can't read the text in the full size image, here is the relevant part
Most of the photographs in "Earth From Above" were shot from a helicopter within an altitude between 30 and 3000 meters. Yann Arthus Bertrand has always worked with CANON equipment. For "Earth From Above" he used CANON EOS-1 Ds Mark III, equipped with an L series focal zoom and 17mm to 400mm range. The speed is between 1/250 and 1/1000. Most of the shots are at a 24x36mm format on FUJICHROME film, Velvia 50 ASAAs someone who shoots almost exclusively on film, I am always excited when it is shown to be a vibrant, relevant media on which to take pictures, but something didn't read correctly about these details. The CANON EOS-1 Ds Mark III is not a film camera. It's one of Canon's most recent high-end digital cameras, and yet the information also stated that Arthus-Bertrand shot with film. That meant that this panel was incomplete at best and misleading at worst.
I dug around a little, and found this pamphlet that accompanied the same exhibition taking place at the same time in Bath in the UK. Here is the relevant part again:
The text reads as followsMost of the photographs in EARTH FROM THE AIR, were taken from a helicopter at an altitude of 100 ft. to 10,000 ft. Yann Arthus-Bertrand has always worked with Canon EOS-1N, equipped with an L series focal zoom and 17mm to 400mm range. The speed is between 1/250 and 1/1000. Most of the shots use a 24x36mm format on Fujichrome film, Velvia 50 ASA.This makes more sense. The Canon EOS-1N is a film SLR camera produced in 1994 - over 15 years ago. In the modern camera marketplace terms that we may as well be talking about 50 years instead of 15. However it's consistent with the time when Arthus-Bertrand would have taken these pictures and the details fit together sensibly. On that basis I would take this to be the correct information.
So why the discrepancy?
I doubt it came from Arthus-Bertrand himself. I don't know him as a person or an artist, but I don't see how it serves his purpose to claim two contradictory set of facts in the same exhibition, especially when it is so obvious that one of them is internally inconsistent.
The difference in wording is crucial - in the Bath exhibition it states simply "Yann Arthus-Bertrand has always worked with Canon EOS-1N", a statement of fact, whereas in the Bombay one it sounds more like Canon marketing - "Yann Arthus-Bertrand has always worked with CANON equipment".
The specificity of the digital camera used leads me to believe that someone at Canon saw an opportunity to promote their latest and greatest range of digital cameras ("we can't say these amazing pictures were taken with a camera from 15 years ago! And a FILM one at that!!"), and messed with the text, thinking that no one would notice. Or worse, they thought that the original text they were given was clearly wrong ("film cameras can't take these kind of pictures, it must be a mistake"), and helpfully decided to correct it.
Whoever you are, shame on you.
update! on Yann Arthus-Bertrand's website, he gives more detailed information on his equipment (via Backstage -> Working Methods -> Photographic Equipment), confirming that he did shoot these pictures on film, and since 1996 has switched primarily to digital.
