The photographer who took the powerful foot-washing images for a Jesus ad that played at Super Bowl LVIII has revealed the huge production value behind the photos and hit back at critics who say the ad was AI-generated.

The advertisement from the group “He Gets Us” is a Bible reference to when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples on the night of the Last Supper.

Photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten was commissioned by He Gets Us to shoot a series of high-quality, fine art photos of people washing the feet of others.

The big production shoot was shot over the course of a week in Los Angeles at the end of last year and Fullerton-Batten tells PetaPixel that she had to keep the project quiet.

“They wanted this campaign to be very powerful, very meaningful. It’s about loving your neighbor, and you can’t choose your neighbor,” she says.

“It’s about washing one another’s feet, which is what Jesus did. It’s passing on that message: I wash your feet, you wash the next person’s feet.

“Taking shoes off and kneeling down and bowing down and washing someone’s feet is a very powerful statement in my opinion.”

The ad — which has been a hot topic of conversation since it aired — is a series of photos set to a moving soundtrack. Each still was a huge production involving elaborate sets and dozens of photo assistants.

“We were like a big enormous TV crew,” Fullerton-Batten adds. “We had to shut down a whole street just to park the vehicles.”

So Good That Some People Don’t Believe The Photos Are Real

Despite Fullerton-Batten’s and the crew’s hard work, some were questioning whether the images were actually generated by AI. With SB Nation publishing a false article that the ad was made by AI.

“I’ve read on social media that some people are questioning if it’s AI,” she says.

“That’s a problem when something’s so beautifully and highly produced that people start questioning if it’s real or not real.

“I think that’s a shame. That makes me very sad because we spent so much time creating and there was amazing teamwork from everybody involved and people make flippant comments, ‘Is it AI?’”

Fullerton-Batten says she wanted the people in the photos to remain normal looking — something she was conscious of in the editing process.

“[I wanted] to make it look as real as possible in this kind of highly staged, cinematic scenario. But at the same time, hopefully, it feels real and people can connect with it,” she adds.

The London-based photographer says that when she was doing the initial research, she couldn’t find any pictures of people’s feet being washed that weren’t related to a spa treatment — Yet more proof that the pictures weren’t AI-generated because AI models have to be trained on existing photos.

“That in itself [the fact there were no existing images] is also exciting for me as a photographer,” she says.

“This is the kind of campaign that I like to do — this is what excites me — passing on messages and doing something very creative.

“For me, they’re like art pieces. And that’s why I took on the project as well, not only because of the message but also to create beautiful imagery.”

A set of AI images did appear during the commerical break at the Super Bowl: But it was the Minions making fun of them.

More of Fullerton-Batten’s work can be found on her website and Instagram.

Image credits: Photographs by Julia Fullerton-Batten

March marks Maryland Wine Month, and in celebration, two local businesses have joined forces to present a unique community gathering.

Downtown Silver Spring wine café Locavino is partnering with local photographer Jonna Huseman of Jonna Michelle Photography to host an art show and tasting event with a Maryland theme on Saturday, March 2, from 5-9 p.m.

Attendees can look forward to viewing original artwork by Jonna Michelle Photography, featuring picturesque scenes from five Maryland wineries. The artist will be present, offering guests the chance to discover more about Maryland’s wine industry through tastings and conversations with winemakers themselves.

“Here in the Mid-Atlantic, most people associate wines and wineries with Virginia. We’re aiming to change that,” said Locavino co-owner Justin Wallace. “Maryland has a vibrant and deep-seated wine culture, and we want people to know the incredible stories of Maryland winemakers. In some cases, these businesses have supported our local economy for generations. Through our Maryland Wine Month event, we’re shining a light on a true hidden gem and inviting people to join us in learning more about — and even falling in love with — Maryland wines and winemakers.”

Locavino, which opened its doors in 2019 and specializes in wines from Maryland, Italy, and Spain, can be found at 8519 Fenton Street in Downtown Silver Spring. The wine café has been honored with the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for four consecutive years, with its first win in 2020.

Graphic Courtesy of Jonna Michelle Photography

A wedding photographer must pay $30,000 in civil penalties for advertising her services using images taken by other photographers and failing to disclose that the pictures were not her own.

Last year, Kansas-based wedding photographer Caitlyn Payne was accused of “scamming” couples by faking a family emergency and not turning up to take pictures on their big day.

The photographer, who runs the business CP Family Photography, has allegedly done this multiple times.

Payne had also allegedly misrepresented her wedding photography business with deceptive advertising, specifically showing sample images taken by other photographers and passing them off as her own.

Now, according to a report by 12 News, Payne has entered into a consent judgment after being investigated by the District Attorney’s office in Sedgwick County, Kansas for violating the Kansas Consumer Protection Act (KCPA).

While Payne denied intentionally violating the KCPA, she accepted a consent judgment to resolve the matter.

The agreement calls for Payne to be liable for $30,000.00 in civil penalties, additional investigative expenses, and court costs while on a 48-month probationary period.

12 News reports that the photographer will also have to pay more than $2,000.00 in restitution to two clients.

Payne has promised not to use images belonging to other photographers moving forward unless they are clearly and conspicuously disclosed as only a style of photography that she is capable of reproducing.

The agreement also calls for an injunction from the photographer engaging in further deceptive or unconscionable acts and cooperating with any future complaints.

Family Emergencies and a ‘Fake’ Car Crash

According to an investigation by KAKE News last year, Payne had a history of not showing up on her clients’ wedding day.

Nick and Kirstie Steffen hired Payne as the photographer for their wedding in February last year. The couple had hired her months before after meeting Payne at a wedding expo.

However, on the day of their wedding, Nick says Payne called him in a panic. Payne told him that her daughter had been in a car crash and that she was not going to be able to shoot their ceremony in the afternoon.

Later, the couple was even more shocked when they allegedly discovered a post on Facebook that revealed that Payne was not at the hospital with her daughter who she claimed was in a car crash.

In photos supposedly posted on Facebook by the Derby Drama Club on February 18, Payne was seen at her daughter’s musical at Derby High School at the same time as the couple’s wedding.

It also appeared that the photographer had attended a retirement party that she helped to organize after the play.

Other couples also claimed that Payne was either a no-show, left their ceremony early, or did not get their photos in a timely matter — if at all.

According to KAKE News, Payne also claimed that the “fake photographs” she used promotionally were stock photos she paid for and uses for Facebook advertising. But investigators allegedly tracked down the photographer who actually took those pictures, and he said no one was allowed to use his photographs as their own.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

The challenge of displaying every photograph taken during a day’s outing offers photographers a compelling lens through which to scrutinize their craft. This approach, highlighting the tension between quantity and quality, encourages a deeper engagement with the fundamental aspects of photography such as composition and lighting.

Coming to you from James Popsys, this insightful video delves into his personal experiment inspired by a concept borrowed from another artist. Popsys decides to document and share every photo he captures during a trip to Coney Island, regardless of their perceived quality. This approach is rooted in a desire to counteract the common “spray and pray” method often facilitated by digital photography, where the abundance of storage allows for thousands of shots to be taken with the hope that some will be usable. Popsys argues that this abundance can dilute a photographer’s focus and commitment to capturing a moment perfectly. By imposing restrictions on himself, he explores whether these constraints enhance his concentration and lead to more deliberate and meaningful photography. The video serves as an intriguing case study on the impact of self-imposed limitations on creative output and the quality of photographic work.

The venture to Coney Island in the middle of January, with its deserted landscapes and dystopian vibe, provided an ideal backdrop for this experiment. Popsys’ reflections on the day reveal a mixed bag of outcomes. While he felt a heightened sense of concentration and discernment in his photography, the experiment also introduced a hesitancy to press the shutter, fearing the imperfection of the result. This hesitancy, Popsys notes, could be counterproductive in the realm of digital photography, where the cost of taking an extra photo is negligible. His experience underscores the delicate balance between being overly critical and the freedom to capture moments without fear, suggesting a middle path that fosters focus without stifling spontaneity. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Popsys.

Looking back at her transcription of an interview that Gordon Parks gave more than 20 years ago resonates even more meaningfully today

I’ve been a journalist for twenty years, but long before that, I was building the foundation for this career. Not just by writing, but with all my “money jobs” to sustain myself while I wrote plays and fiction. In the last few years, I’ve found those experiences birthing journalism and insights.

I know now that photographer and Renaissance man Gordon Parks (1912–2006) changed my life. I never met him, but in 1996, in the midst of a career freefall, I got a job transcribing interviews for an agency. I was one of a team of transcriptionists that was assigned to work on photographer John Loengard’s (1934–2020) interviews of the original Life magazine photographers.

Loengard was determined to memorialize them and their experiences while they were still alive. He videotaped them in 1993 and three years later we transcriptionists were given tapes of the audio.

Transcribing, for me, is a full-body experience: you receive the voice through headphones and it travels down to your arms and out through your hands, while your feet work a pedal controlling pauses and starts of the tape. So, in essence, somebody’s voice and the energy it carries do a loop-de-loop through your body.

The Relaxed Tone of Voice

Today, in 2024, as I read the proofing transcript I saved of the Gordon Parks interview, his tranquil, unhurried voice rises through the words: fragmented sentences that Loengard would later edit or eliminate for his book “Life Photographers: What They Saw.” And almost immediately, on feeling Parks’s coherence — his relaxed, self-accepting flow — I react like a present-day tuning fork, immersed in sympathetic resonance. My breathing deepens, heartbeat slows, synchronizing with Parks.

I bathe in his effortless generosity as he recounts inviting members of a Harlem gang to his home in the country, to play with his kids and ride horses.

I bathe in his effortless generosity as he recounts inviting members of a Harlem gang to his home in the country, to play with his kids and ride horses. He was covering the gang for a major story, and, since he often quotes dialogue, he brings me to the streets of Harlem in 1948 — makes me see and feel the danger of gang leader Red Jackson — but, as Parks was, I’m relaxed.

When he’d received the assignment, he says, “Frankly, I didn’t believe I could do the story. But I put myself out there and why not try?” And with the same curiosity he has for all people, he befriended a cop who introduced him to Red. And later in the interview, almost as an afterthought, he mentions that the reason he fell into a friendship with Red and his boys was that he’d hoped to expose them to a way of living and a place that they didn’t know existed.

This calm, steady vision directed Parks’s relationships with everyone, and in fact it was the way he lived. “Why not try?” seemed to be his mantra. He got the coveted job at Life because one day he decided to walk into picture editor Wilson Hicks’s office to see about work — no appointment; his attitude was “what do I have to lose?”

Thoughts on Henry Luce

He met the publisher of Life, the elusive Henry Luce, with a similar gaze. He rejected the common rumor that the man wanted nothing to do with anyone. ” … [W]hen I used to see him on the elevator, I thought he was very aloof. He didn’t speak to anyone. Sometimes they just let him go up on the elevator alone, and I didn’t like that very much, but this morning after I had visited his home [when Parks was doing a fashion shoot in Paris], he was standing in the corner and I said, ‘Well, good morning, Mr. Luce.’ And he says, ‘Oh, good morning, Mr. Parks, how are you?’ and he talked all the way up the elevator shaft. And he couldn’t stop talking. And I realized the man was just a little shy. He was not aloof whatsoever.”

No matter who he encountered, Parks remained neutral and curious. In the 1960s when he was sent to cover the Black Panthers, this outlook became more conscious. “I knew Life magazine didn’t know whether or not they could trust me out there … whether I would do it fairly, whether or not I would lean with them one way or the other.”

And Malcolm X was similarly distrustful of Parks because he was working for a white company. But when Parks refused Panther money to make a documentary about the group — without a pause, turning down half a million dollars because he didn’t want to be beholden and therefore pressured to share Malcolm’s point of view — he was allowed entre.

“But you weren’t intimidated?” asks Loengard.

“No, I was not intimidated,” answers Parks simply.

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About his early life, Parks says “I was surviving more than anything else.” He’d dropped out of high school and was frightened. His parents and 14 brothers and sisters all wanted him “to be somebody” so he was determined to “be somebody.” Hence, while he was trying to just “hang on,” he played piano, basketball and herded cattle. “The photography was an accident. Everything was an accident,” he shrugs.

This man may have been frightened about his early survival, but in a profound way, he was fearless. And I posit that it was because he was so grounded in the “nothing to lose” belief that he was available for amazing accidents (which he and many other Life photographers call “luck”) and the extraordinary life of creation he ended up living.

Because he knew nothing, Parks was not afraid to ask for help. While at Life, he knew nothing about lenses and got help from Life laboratory technicians who gave out equipment.

Seemingly effortlessly he shifted between glamorous fashion and movie star shoots to poverty, cops and robbers, and Al Capone. “I had the capacity to readjust so quickly,” he explains. “I always say it’s because I was brought up in Kansas where you had to readjust if you were Black, very quickly, you know.”

So shifting between diametrically opposed job environments was easy: “I just said, well, I’m in a different kind of story. I didn’t anguish over it one way or another.” Yet his empathy with his subjects is palpable. So he had a miraculous combination of detachment from a story, but deep feeling and connection to the people playing out the stories.

Pen to Paper

Transcribing Gordon Parks was help I didn’t know I needed in 1996, but I’m only just now realizing it has accrued interest over time. Originally, it was such an emotional experience that I had to express it, so I wrote this letter to Loengard and his video producer, Kathy Sulkes:

April 15, 1996

Dear Ms. Sulkes and Mr. Loengard:

I have been transcribing tapes of your Life photographer interviews. When I found myself weeping and making noises, and periodically having to lie down on my living room floor to digest what I was hearing, I knew something profound was going on.

After my first batch of tapes [which included Gordon Parks], I wanted to talk, but when I delivered my work to Wordflow, I felt a little funny about expressing such intense feelings. No need. They had heard it all before. Everything I said — from the research I was doing to get correct spellings because I felt so honored to be allowed to work on this that I wanted to get it right, to my emotional response — everything I said, I was told another transcriptionist had said the same thing. Apparently this material had transcriptionists all over New York City buried in reference books and weeping at their computers.

And I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that I was part of something huge — an immense wave that 60 years ago drew people in from all over the planet and sent them out to witness Life and transmit their impressions to others. And now, all these years later, that same wave had pulled these witnesses back in again to testify. And it is no accident that this began with a man named Luce (light).

Listening to these oral histories of people in their 70s and 80s has been a deeply spiritual experience. Cornell Capa seemed to articulate what has moved me so — the idea that the job was/is to share witness in order to make things better.

You have an incredibly powerful body of work here. I hope you will send it out to the world and let it sing.

Had I known this was what history was when I was in school, I would have listened.

Sincerely,
Betsy Robinson

And here is his handwritten reply on a Georgia O’Keeffe postcard, dated 4/29/96:

Dear Betsy Robinson,

Thanks for your letter about the LIFE Photographers tapes—I’ve passed it on to Kathy Sulks [sic] and others, at LIFE. So far there’s no movement towards getting it on the air but a comment — reaction —like yours is a help.

Thanks,
John Loengard

Loengard died in 2020, but he did manage to publish “Life Photographers: What They Saw” in 1998. It includes edited interviews of Gordon Parks and 43 other Life photographers who were on staff between 1936 and 1972. Also included is their photojournalism and a gallery of photojournalist portraits along with a comprehensive selected reading list and an index.

Gordon Parks and so many others whose voices still resonate inside me understood their jobs: to witness, spread truth, to make the world a better place.

Over the years, I’ve told many people who work in radio about the existence of these tapes and video. So far, nobody has succeeded in tracking anything down. And I imagine the video has long since decomposed and who knows what’s become of the audio cassettes.

In this essay, I have quoted brief passages from my proofing transcript in the spirit of praising this work — as a reviewer of both the transcript and the published book, which the copyright notice says is allowed.

Gordon Parks and so many others whose voices still resonate inside me understood their jobs: to witness, spread truth, to make the world a better place. This many years later, merely reading Parks’s words touches personal places, makes me feel the fearlessness of “Why not?” Why not try out my ideas? — I’m starting my own publishing company, Kano Press. Why not ask famous people for book blurbs?

Why not write this article conveying the energy of fearless generosity of an extraordinary human long after his death? Why not be peaceful and fearless — no matter what is going on around us? What else have we got to do? We’ll either succeed or fail, die or live. Why not share what I witnessed almost three decades ago? Isn’t that the job: to witness and share and hope it’ll make things better?

Editor’s note: For more information, visit the Gordon Parks Foundation. They are currently sponsoring an exhibit of Mr. Parks’s work, “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson,” at Mia (Minneapolis Institute of Art) in Minneapolis through June 23, 2024.

Betsy Robinson Betsy Robinson is a novelist, journalist, editor, and playwright. Her articles have been published in The Progressive, Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, The Sunlight Press, Prairie Fire, Salvation South, Next Avenue,and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators will be published by Kano Press in 2024. Read More

California’s desolate Mojave Desert may be the setting for “Lust in the Dust,” a new photography exhibition that just opened at Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago’s West Loop. But the documentary project’s origin story starts here in Chicago, with a local photographer, a TV-series-turned-cult-classic and a burlesque performer with an 8-foot python.

In the late 1990s, Chicago photographer Joe Gallo, now 70, was inspired to shoot a series of portraits inspired by the HBO television series Carnivále. This led him to the Beat Kitchen on Belmont Avenue, where a burlesque performer known as Cherish ran a show called Belmont Burlesque that also starred her 8-foot python.

Gallo started documenting various burlesque performances across the city, and through those connections, he was introduced to the famed Miss Exotic World Museum, a retreat center and archive situated in Helendale, Calif., on a former chicken ranch.

Early in the 1990s, burlesque performers used the property as a way station between performances in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. But eventually it became something of a pilgrimage site where veteran and fledgling performers convened to celebrate their craft and the home of the annual Miss Exotic World pageant, featuring the who’s who of the burlesque world.

Gallo traveled to document the Miss Exotic World pageant twice at the Helendale location, as well as when the museum eventually found a home in Las Vegas. His photographs — displaying through March in a converted West Side church that is now a cultural venue — transport the viewer to what feels like an alternate dimension, where glamorous dancers in sequined costumes pose and shimmy against an otherworldly and arid landscape.

Alongside Gallo’s photos, the exhibition showcases a set of ceramic and mixed media skulls by the artist Marilyn Artus. As a former burlesque producer, Artus created these sculptures to pay tribute to the divas who innovated the art form. A burlesque performance on Feb. 17 will also give visitors the chance to witness performers in action.

Gallo told WBEZ contributor Andrew Meriwether the backstory behind five photos in the exhibition. Below you’ll find those stories in the photographer’s own words.

Sit on Your Hands – Circa 2003/2005

“I am a little lower than eye level, and I’m following the women kind of going down the runway because they had a walk-by part of their performance. And there was a shed that they were walking in front of — kind of like a pool house — and that guy had set up a chair on top of the shed. I don’t know if he was a Dixie Evans partner [Dixie Evans is the performer who founded the museum], but he was somebody who was significant within the Miss Exotic World ranch camp. And he just sat up there the whole show, just like that on his hands. Every time I looked, he was up there.”

Lust in the Dust – Circa 2003/2005

“That little suitcase, that’s what caught my eye. Basically, she had finished her performance and was walking back to the dressing room. And she just had a look about her. So I just stopped her and I said, ‘Hey, would you mind if I took your photo? Could you walk towards that Winnebago thing?’ And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure.’ And then when I was going through and editing them I thought that’s really cool because it looks like a different kind of story. It looked more like a film clip or movie poster. And I thought, ‘Well, what would the title of that movie be?’ And “Lust in the Dust” just kind of evolved out of that.”

Glam – Circa 2003/2005

“That’s probably one the most posed pictures that I took during those two times out there. She just —as many of those performers do – knows what she looks like on the other side of the camera. And it’s great, because she just threw those poses out. This is one of several. She threw her arm back and took a puff on that big cigarette. And it was like, this is great, you know? And once you start, it’s kind of hard to stop.”

Bambi the Mermaid – Circa 2003/2005

“What I enjoyed about [Miss Exotic World] is that everybody thinks ‘Oh, they’re strippers’ and it’s like, no, they’re not really strippers. They have a concept and it’s a kind of a reveal. There’s a lot of drama and there’s an enormous amount of humor in what they’re doing. Every one of them has a tongue-in-cheek turn within their performances. And getting the audience to laugh is as important for them as the oohs and ahhs that they might get for what they can do.”

Miss Exotic World Fans – Circa 2003/2005

“So a lot of the people that are amongst that group under that trellis were other performers. Like the guy with the fez was actually an emcee for one of the girl’s acts. And then there was just an interesting array of different people who were becoming fans of the new age of burlesque. The whole thing was kind of quietly advertised. I don’t know what kind of publicity they were pushing out to get crowds. But there would literally be several 100 people there. It was a weekend, so there were a couple of days of workshops and skill classes for the performers. A little bit of choreography, you know, how to dance, how you do all this stuff. And then a lot of it was like how to make your costumes because they did all that. You have to realize that up at that point this is all self-financed. So women were doing their own makeup, they were doing their own hair, they were buying and making their own costumes, and choreographing their own dances.”

If you go: “Lust in the Dust” runs through March 23 at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave. The show is free and open to the public Wednesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Daytime visitation requires emailing art@epiphanychi.com to schedule an appointment.

Andrew Meriwether is an audio producer and journalist based in Chicago.

Like a great many scientific discoveries, this one begins over beers.

That’s how economist Andreas Madestam first heard about a treasure trove of old pictures — nearly 2 million of them, taken by pilots and photographers flying over what remained of the British Empire and other members of the British Commonwealth in the aftermath of World War II.

The aerial photos, collected mainly between 1946 and 1991, might not sell for much at a pawn shop. But to scientists, they offer untold potential — as they can provide a rare glimpse of the planet in the decades before advanced satellites began circling the globe.

At least, that’s what Madestam thought when a new acquaintance told him of the collection one bleary night about 10 years ago during a social sciences conference in London.

“He started telling me about this crazy archive,” Madestam said. “Actually, it didn’t sound that crazy — it sounded wonderful.”

The conversation ultimately would lead to a heroic race to digitize every image in the collection. Along the way, the effort itself turned into its own kind of adventure, filled with invasive mold, funding worries, a museum scandal — even robots.

But to those involved, the prize is immense — as the photos can illustrate in incredible detail how much the Earth has changed in just a few generations.

The collection presents a rare visual timeline of 20th-century human development across much of sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The volume too is important, as the 1.7 million images can help scientists trace how global policies, political change, geopolitical conflicts and other factors have altered human and natural systems.

These insights, in turn, can help forecast future changes to the planet.

“It’s the kind of project where I feel a real sense of duty that we have to do a good job here,” said Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the researchers working on the project.

The photo gallery, Hsiang added, is the “only source of data for large parts of the world for a lot of this time period.”

Beers lead to the first clue

It was 2014, and Madestam was in London for an interdisciplinary conference on development hosted by the U.K.’s Economic and Social Research Council.

An economist at Stockholm University in Sweden, he was there to give a presentation on microfinance in Uganda. By chance, he got talking with another conference attendee, and the two decided to grab a drink.

Soon, his new drinking buddy — a researcher by the name of Dan Brockington — was telling him about a rare collection of aerial photos.

“He started telling me about these photographs, and this was really cool, but he didn’t really know what to do with it,” Madestam said. “And I just started thinking about all the possibilities.”

It was clear the collection was something special.

Satellites have helped researchers keep track of changing land use, infrastructure and urbanization around the world since the 1970s. But many nations have little documentation of these kinds of large-scale changes prior to the satellite record. The archive sounded like a gold mine of rare historical information.

But there was a problem.

The collection had never been digitized, meaning all that information was locked up in 1.7 million unwieldy physical images sitting in a storage facility in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Brockington himself had attempted, nearly a decade before, to help raise funds for a digitization effort. But it never got off the ground, partly because the technology available in the early 2000s just couldn’t support such a massive project.

But in 2014?

“We were at the point where things started moving in terms of digitization and storage space,” Madestam said. “We were fortunate to stumble on this 10 years later, or eight years later, and that made much of a difference.”

Madestam returned home after the conference and immediately brought the idea to his colleague Anna Tompsett, a fellow economist at Stockholm University. She quickly recognized the archive’s research potential.

“I sort of went away and started brainstorming,” Tompsett said.

She created a spreadsheet of possible research projects and found she couldn’t stop coming up with ideas — the document kept growing. She and Madestam decided they had to raise the money to digitize the entire archive.

It would be no small undertaking. The collection includes nearly 1.7 million individual images, most of them 9-by-9-inch prints.

“The first year, we wrote seven [grant] applications,” Tompsett said. “And five got rejected.”

By that time, the archive had passed into the hands of its current stewards, the National Collection of Aerial Photography.

Tompsett and Madestam first got in touch with NCAP in 2015 to talk about their digitization dreams and found the staff there weren’t surprised to hear from them — they had long believed in the collection’s research potential.

“But I guess they waited for us to actually be able to bring some money to the project before they took us too seriously,” Tompsett said.

In 2017, the first major funding finally came through: around $1 million from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation to preserve and digitize the archive.

Around the same time, Tompsett and Madestam began looping in another team of researchers at UC Berkeley, led by Hsiang, one of Tompsett’s former grad school classmates.

The researchers knew it could take years to scan all the images by hand. But they didn’t have unlimited time. NCAP aimed to digitize at least 1.2 million images by the end of 2022.

The race was on.

Forgotten, rescued, resurrected

The National Collection of Aerial Photography in Edinburgh houses more than 30 million images in total dating from the 1920s on, making it one of the largest collections of its kind.

Its most famous archives house reconnaissance photography taken during World War II, which composes a large chunk of its inventory.

But the post-war surveys that caught Madestam and Tompsett’s attention were a different kind of project altogether.

Those images were collected through an initiative formerly known as the Directorate of Colonial Surveys, later renamed the Directorate of Overseas Surveys. First established in 1946, the project carried out aerial mapping projects in British colonies or Commonwealth members without large-scale surveying capabilities of their own.

Between the 1940s and the early 1990s, the initiative surveyed at least 55 countries, from the Caribbean to Africa to Oceania, some of whose names and borders have shifted since the project ended.

Many of the flights were meticulously designed using a system known as “mowing the lawn.”

Surveyors would sweep back and forth above a plot of land in overlapping strips, similar to a lawnmower traversing a field, taking photos at regular intervals along the way. Afterwards, they could lay out all the prints side by side and use them to draw maps of the area.

The project broadly concluded by the early 1990s, with modern satellite technology having largely filled the need for aerial surveys by that time. The British government returned most of the photo negatives to the countries from which they were taken, keeping only the prints, and the archive fell into obscurity.

In the early 2000s, the collection was transferred to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England, where it remained for nearly a decade.

Then, scandal struck.

In 2011, the museum’s director was dismissed amid allegations of missing or stolen exhibits. In 2012, the BBC reported that at least 144 items entrusted to the museum by eight different lenders were still unaccounted for. At least one — a 19th century painting — was found to have been sold at auction in 2008 without the owner’s knowledge.

The city of Bristol eventually took charge of the rest of the museum’s collections.

It was amid this turmoil that the National Collection of Aerial Photography’s director, Allan Williams, entered the picture — another fortuitous twist in the collection’s history.

Williams was conducting research for a book project on aerial photography at the time. He remembered hearing about the Directorate of Overseas Surveys archive and started to wonder what had become of it. After a quick internet search, he found that its former museum home in Bristol had closed.

When he called to inquire about it, he learned the entire collection was about to be destroyed. It was too large, and the new curators hadn’t found anyone else to take it on.

Williams swiftly mobilized.

He quickly secured permission from the U.K.’s National Archives for the images to be added to NCAP’s own collections. Then, he and other NCAP staff members started making trips down to Bristol to rescue the photos.

Covered in mold

They found the collection in an alarming state.

At that time, the museum collections were housed in the Bristol Temple Meads railway station, a nearly 200-year-old historic brick building nestled on the River Avon.

The photos were kept in what were formerly the station’s stables, a damp space that had not been equipped for archival storage. Most of the images were still in decent condition, but some of them were covered in mold.

The clock was ticking as Williams and the rest of the team rushed to catalog the collection and box it up. A developer had its eye on the building and was anxious for its former occupants to finish moving out.

It took a total of five weeks and 26 fully loaded 18-wheelers to bring the enormous collection back to Edinburgh, where it was properly stored.

The archive was finally safe from damp and destruction — but for several years, it languished in relative obscurity. Only about 10 clients each year would request materials from it, compared with multiple requests a day for the more popular World War II images.

Little did the archivists know that, across the North Sea, two Swedish researchers were busy contemplating the collection’s possibilities. NCAP rescued the archive shortly before Madestam first met Brockington for beers.

When the first major funding award came through from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, it was a breakthrough — finally — in the journey toward digitizing 1.7 million physical photos and getting on with the research.

But there was still a problem: how to do it in a timely fashion.

“When we did get the grant, I suppose there was a moment when it was, ‘Oh great, we’ve got the grant,’ – and then, ‘Oh dear, we’ve got the grant, we’re gonna actually have to work out how to do this,’” Williams said.

Robots to the rescue

NCAP staff first contemplated hiring extra help and digitizing the entire archive by hand, a herculean endeavor that they eventually dismissed as too time-consuming and expensive.

Next, they turned to technology.

NCAP already had an automated process for digitizing film. It didn’t seem too far of a stretch to automate the print-scanning process, too.

After watching endless YouTube videos online, Williams decided robots were the way to go. He quickly enlisted Alan Potts, NCAP’s digital imaging manager, to help find the right company to work with. (The digitization project was first reported last year by The Telegraph.)

What NCAP needed was a robot with the ability to pick up an individual sheet of photo paper, transfer it to a scanning machine, scan the image, move it aside and pick up the next sheet. Plenty of robots already on the market can pick up objects and move them around, but they don’t necessarily have the capability to select delicate sheets of paper from large stacks.

NCAP eventually decided to partner with a technology company in England called CBM-Logix, which specializes in modifying off-the-shelf robots for specialized functions. The result was a specialized machine with a kind of vacuum sucker specifically designed to pick up individual sheets of paper without damaging them.

The robots also were equipped with a special light and sensor to help them differentiate between the photos sheets and the heavy metal plates distributed throughout the stacks to keep the paper flat. When the machines detected a plate, they were programmed to lift it with magnets and move it to the side.

In 2020, a single prototype was finally ready for testing. The project was now less than two years from deadline, and the clock was ticking.

The next hurdle: finding the right person to manage the project.

‘A little bit like toddlers’

When Sheila Masson arrived at NCAP in early 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, she wasn’t sure she’d be there for long. She’d been furloughed from her previous job and hired at the archive on a temporary contract as a digital imaging assistant.

Yet Masson had an extensive background in photography, with more than two decades of experience. It must have been in the blood, she said — her father had worked for Kodak for 35 years. She was able to quickly work her way up from the ground level at NCAP, and before long, she was given a special project to manage.

NCAP needed her to test out a robot.

Masson was assigned a country — Gambia — and tasked with scanning all the images from that part of the collection. That also meant troubleshooting, taking notes on the robot’s performance and thinking of ways it could be improved in later iterations.

In total, Masson’s project scanned 13,566 images in a little more than three months using just the one prototype robot. It went so well that she was quickly promoted and made manager of the entire Directorate of Overseas Surveys scanning project.

The project officially kicked off in September 2021, with five robots, eight human team members and just over a year to deadline. Even then, there were still kinks to work out.

While the robots could technically run 24 hours a day, the team found they often needed some oversight. Sometimes they’d pick up two prints at once. Sometimes they’d drop things. Sometimes they’d leave a sheet on the scanner, ruining all the scans that came after it.

“They’re a little bit like toddlers — when they go quiet, that’s when you have to worry,” Masson said. “So there were all sorts of things that could potentially go wrong.”

Some of the robots had such specific quirks that the team gave them names. GRAN-E (inspired by the Pixar film WALL-E) was known for her grumping and groaning. The Terminator earned his name for his habit of throwing plates and prints on the floor. Masson considered sticking googly eyes on them, but she worried they’d fall off and land on the prints.

The team eventually worked out an optimal schedule for the robots, aiming to scan around 140,000 prints a month. They added two more robots to the team after a few months, speeding up the process.

“I think it was the beginning of February 2022 the first robot went all the way through the night,” Potts said. “We came in in the morning, and it was still running. Within two weeks, all the robots were running through the night.”

Meanwhile, the team worked with the researchers in Sweden and California to decide which countries to prioritize.

Many images had to be cleaned and flattened as they went along. The team set up giant humidification chambers to moisten the prints and take the curl out of the edges. Once removed from the chambers, the prints would be placed in a paper press and flattened for several days before scanning.

Mold was even harder to deal with.

Team members would have to don full personal protective equipment and carefully brush the prints with a special type of vacuum. After completing each box of prints, they had to meticulously clean their brushes and equipment to avoid mixing contaminants.

“You never knew if it was the same kind of mold on the next box,” Masson said.

A major milestone

On Nov. 2, 2022, the team achieved its first major milestone: 1 million scans.

“We literally had this big celebration because it was this extraordinary number to have reached,” Masson said.

And the following month, on Dec. 22, the team officially hit 1.2 million images, reaching another goal.

That wasn’t the end, though. Half a million images still remained — and they included some of the most challenging boxes in the bunch. Many of these photos were covered in mold or badly curled at the edges, and they needed to be cleaned, humidified and flattened before they could be scanned.

Malaysia was one of the worst. It was a huge archive and in poor condition.

“We literally worked on Malaysia for six months,” Masson said.

In 2023, NCAP’s parent organization — Historic Environment Scotland — kicked in additional funding to help finish scanning the rest of the remaining images. On Nov. 23, 2023, the project hit one of its final milestones: The last images from the collection were scanned, and the digitization process was complete.

Just 11 years prior, the entire archive had nearly been lost forever. Now, it was immortal.

But for Tompsett, Madestam and their U.S. colleagues, the work is just beginning.

For the last few years, they’ve been steadily knitting the digital images into mosaics. That means piecing all the individual photos from a given location into a single regional or national-scale image.

“What that gets you is something that kind of resembles a modern high-res satellite image, but in black and white,” Tompsett said.

In places with multiple surveys over multiple years, these mosaics present a visual documentation of the changing landscape over time. They can indicate places where forests have been planted or destroyed, where cities have risen and expanded, where dams and bridges and other infrastructure have been built.

That opens up a huge array of research possibilities.

The international research team includes members with expertise ranging from environmental economics and climate change to civil engineering and infrastructure. Each is using the data to investigate a different kind of question.

“I study the environment in order to understand how climate change might impact society,” said Hannah Druckenmiller, an environmental economist at California Institute of Technology, one of the researchers working on the project. “Often what we do is look at how past climate shocks have impacted populations.”

One of her particular interests lies in the Sahel droughts, a series of unusually intense dry periods in sub-Saharan Africa in the latter half of the 20th century. These historical droughts may present scientists with a valuable glimpse into the Earth’s future as the planet continues to warm.

There’s little data available on how these events affected human societies in the region. But the archive has the potential to present new insights, which could help policymakers prepare for the impacts of future disasters.

“We’re really focused on learning from the past what we might expect from the future and how that should guide decisionmaking,” Druckenmiller said.

Plans to make the data public

Other team members are focused on different kinds of studies.

Hsiang’s lab at UC Berkeley includes two graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher involved in the project, each with a different area of expertise.

Hikari Murayama is interested in mapping historical changes in land cover, while Simon Greenhill examines changes in infrastructure and Joel Ferguson investigates trends related to population and wealth.

Their findings may help inform investigations into global climate migration patterns, the impacts of new roads and other infrastructure on economic growth and natural resources, and the ways the world changes as countries achieve independence and experience decolonization.

Despite these different interests, their research methods have common threads. They all rely on specific types of high-resolution historical data, which is often sparse or nonexistent across large swaths of the globe prior to the satellite record.

The archive is now “opening up possibilities for applying these kinds of data-intensive research designs to historical questions,” said Ferguson, the postdoctoral researcher.

These projects are still ongoing, and none of their findings yet have been published.

In the meantime, the researchers are working with NCAP to start making some of their data public, ideally by the end of this year.

They’re planning to start with the mosaics they’ve knitted together from the raw images, eventually releasing other data products related to specific metrics such as changes in land cover or infrastructure. The raw images, themselves, will remain housed under NCAP.

Making the information publicly accessible is core to the research team’s goals, Hsiang said.

“This information was often collected about communities and then put in a warehouse where no one could see it,” he said. “To us, this is an effort to open that up and make it so everyone can access it, and use it, and see how things are changing, and do research and learn about what this might mean for the future.”

The researchers view these efforts as a way of returning the products of their analyses to the countries where the images were first collected — many of which were still under British colonial rule at the time.

“We’re aware we’re working with a sensitive data project,” Druckenmiller said. “This was created during colonization when the British were mapping their former colonies. The way we view this is trying to take back some of this information and make it available to the people that it came from.”

NCAP hasn’t quite finished its role in the project yet, according to Masson. While all the images now have been scanned, there are still some digital files left to transfer.

But Masson herself already has moved on to the next project.

The Directorate of Overseas Surveys team is now a permanent fixture at NCAP, with plans to scan and eternalize more of the organization’s archives.

Buoyed by the success of the last initiative, Masson already has started digitizing another NCAP collection — military reconnaissance photography from the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, a photographic intelligence unit that operated during World War II.

The project is 53,251 images down — only 5.5 million more to go.