Marilyn Bridges
American, born December 26, 1948
Marilyn Bridges, 2003 (courtesy of Wikipedia)
“Through her indomitable drive to capture our collective history, Marilyn Bridges has continued to photograph landscapes marked by the designs of nature and man. Her photographs seek to establish a bond between the past and the present, and reveal the interplay of geography, time, and human intervention.”
“While on an assignment from a travel magazine in 1976, I was coaxed into an aircraft to take photographs of the enormous prehistoric ground drawings on the pampa at Nazca, which can only be seen in their entirety from the air. The flight in a single-engine airplane was a do-or-die initiation. Thermals over the desert rocked the plane constantly, not only scaring me intensely but also making me rather sick. Despite this negative reinforcement, what I was seeing below me was so fantastic that I was instantly hooked on flying and aerial photography.”
Bridges’ work compares favorably to: Terry Evans; Will Garnett; Emmett Gowin; David Maisel; Edward Steichen’s aerial reconnaissance photographs
Featured Publications
Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes (Aperture, 1986)
The Sacred & Secular: A Decade of Aerial Photography (ICP, 1990)
Planet Peru: An Aerial Journey Through a Timeless Land (Aperture, 1991)
Egypt: Antiquities from Above (Little, Brown & Co., 1996)
This Land is Your Land: Across America by Air (Aperture, 1997)
Flights Through Time (Lodima Press, 2007)