Bird’s-Eye View

At any given time, he’s likely to be capturing images of Taiwan from lofty heights.

He’s Taiwan’s most prominent aerial photographer, the most prolific and most seasoned, logging over 20 years of experience and producing over 30,000 photographs of Taiwanese scenery. If you were to compile all of the photos into books and stack them one atop another, they would reach taller than half of the Tai­pei 101 skyscraper.

But in 2011 he added a new wrinkle to his career by crossing over into moving pictures, making him an aerial film director. His most ardent wish has been to reveal to the 23 million people of Taiwan a bird’s-eye vantage of their homeland through footage shot from anywhere between several hundred and over 1000 feet, and in so doing, bear witness to the unfolding changes in the environment.

Taiwan’s foremost aerial photographer, Chi Po-lin.

His main occupation hasn’t been aerial photography. For 23 years he worked at the Ministry of Transportation and Communication’s National Expressway Engineering Bureau. Aerial photography only constituted a minor portion of his work duties, but it was what he found most indispensible, to the point that after departing his post he vowed to invest his energies into shooting Taiwan’s first-ever aerial film.

Before his stint as a civil servant, he once served as an assistant at a photography company. On one occasion he accompanied the photographer on an aerial shoot for a real-estate advertisement. Even though he was confined to an auxiliary role, not to mention that the assignment itself was a humdrum affair to begin with, as he communed with the clouds he felt as though a latent desire had been released from deep within. He knew that aerial photography would be his raison d’être from then on, that he would avail himself of every opportunity to pursue his ambition.

In his second year working for the government, he volunteered to record aerial footage of road projects at various stages of construction as well as upon completion. The bureau chief, Ou Chin-der, then the first to hold the title at the newly created department and now the chairman of Taiwan High Speed Rail, signed off on the proposal. And so, even though the department lacked an official aerial photographer position, it nevertheless created the budget to rent a privately owned helicopter from which Chi could run his semiannual sessions.

The more time he spent in the air, the more obsessed he became. In his spare time he began renting a helicopter on his own or finding a pilot willing to take him along for free so that he could shoot subjects other than highways. His camera didn’t discriminate—mountains, rivers, famous landmarks, farmland, large temple parades—so long as it was majestic, riveting, or even quaintly prosaic when viewed from above.

Chi began his photography career when film photography still reigned. He began using 35-millimeter film, but later switched to larger 120-format color reversal film in the interest of achieving the best quality images.

“Back then I would spend NT$10,000 just to purchase and develop the film for a single two-hour expedition. Assuming favorable weather conditions, in that amount of time I could burn through 60 rolls, which breaks down to one roll every two minutes!” Chi, a solid man standing more than 180 centimeters tall, gushes effusively when holding forth on his passion.

Even following the emergence of digital cameras, he maintained an allegiance to traditional film, feeling that it delivered clarity that had yet to be equaled by the digital upstarts. It was only after the increase in the number of pixels advanced digital cameras to the level of his 120-format camera that he was eventually able to fully embrace the new technology.

Renting a helicopter in Taiwan can run to well over NT$100,000 per hour, four times the rate in the United States, a fact which greatly burdened Chi’s finances.

His photographs were stimulating and offered a perspective inaccessible to most. As a result, the media found them extremely attractive, and before long he became inundated with invitations to submit work. Beginning in 1998, he became a frequent contributor to the environmental magazine The Earth, and though he didn’t realize it at the time, the collaboration was to profoundly alter his perception of photography.

The Earth’s publication of its special edition “The Face of the Earth” in 1998 changed Chi’s approach to photographing Taiwan. It taught him to value honesty in his work, and the importance of capturing the repulsive alongside the beautiful.

Prior to that point he had only concerned himself with beauty. “There just wasn’t any reason to photograph ugly things,” he says.

But when The Earth requested his assistance in furnishing images of illegal mountain farming, shoreline hardening, and industrial zone development among other unsightly phenomena, it was the first time he understood the power of ugliness to shock and even cleanse.

“I’ve no background in environmentalism or ecology, so in the past, my photographs were a means to discover and record beauty. But after those unappealing pictures were chosen, I realized that all of them were the result of large-scale economic expansion in Taiwan, that this was the burden we had inflicted on the environment.”

“The Earth forced me to reevaluate my approach. When they formed a foundation and had the budget to hire me, a different set of priorities began to emerge in my photography.”

For Chi, it signified a move away from industrialism towards environmentalism.

After his awakening, his photography bore out a completely different composition and emphasis. The repellent apparitions that had never crossed his lens before—railway, highways, the wave breakers on Taiwan’s East Coast—he now congregated together, magnifying them, and holding them up to be denounced as sins against the earth: “Ugly, isn’t it!”

Like a makeup artist concealing blemishes, so does industrialism attempt to disguise its exploitation of the land, but the consequences inevitably materialize when nature unleashes natural disasters by way of a reckoning. In 20 years of aerial photography, the painful images of a ravaged Taiwan following Typhoon Mo­ra­kot’s assault are the ones that are seared most indelibly in Chi’s mind.

“I used to take pictures of Mt. Ban­ping in Kao­hsiung, bald from excessive excavation, and think nothing of it—after all, the country needed the concrete for infrastructure!” As to what sparked his awareness and even goaded him to action in those days when public consciousness was still at an embryonic stage, he says, “What I saw from the air changed my perception of Taiwan’s environment. It provided a direction and purpose for my photography.”

Since abandoning the purely aesthetic approach of the past and cultivating a more conscientious and morally edifying mode of aerial photography, it has been Chi’s wish for the past 10 years to get involved with environmental education. Towards that end, in order to focus on the production of his film, in 2011 he left his civil service job, making aerial film his priority for life after 50.

He’s spent many an evening pondering the same vexatious problem: For whom are all the photos that I shoot?

On the occasions that he’s given university lectures, he’s noticed that the only ones who take an interest in his photographs are the ecology professor types, while the majority of the students snooze indifferently. He began to wonder if his work possessed any intrinsic interest. Would it perhaps be more compelling, he mused, if he presented it in the form of moving pictures, soundtrack and all?

He ruminated on his awkward experiences as an aerial film consultant for Taiwanese filmmakers and advertising film directors. “Local filmmakers are so out of it! They think it’s good enough to take the camera and prop it up on your lap with a pillow as a makeshift shock absorber.” He questioned further: “How is it that overseas, the Discovery Channel delivers such quality photography with such steady images?”

He found his answer online: better equipment. He was all for placing an order as soon as possible, but when he saw the price tag, he immediately felt as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped on his head. Purchasing the equipment required the prior approval of the US State Department, but the real issue was that the typical aerial camera system cost NT$30 million, so high, he figured, he’d barely be able to afford the sales tax!

But, unable to deny his passion, he decided to proceed with his plans and deal with the consequences later. In 2009 he invested NT$3 million—his life savings plus money that he borrowed—to rent some equipment and hire an American instructor over to Taiwan. The expenditure was sufficient only to fund 30 hours of flying time—one loop around the island—which after editing resulted in a series of demo sequences of around five minutes each—“just to show that we knew how to film Taiwan from the air.”

Not long thereafter, Home, an environmental film directed by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with famous director Luc Besson as executive producer, hit the theaters in Taiwan. Seeing prestigious international filmmakers exploring similar territory was tremendously encouraging to Chi.

Up to that point, the mention of his goals to his friends was always met with incredulity and negativity. They would say, “That’s impossible! Whoever heard of a feature film shot entirely from the air?” “Home was, in fact, just that sort of film,” he says, “and it really helped bolster my confidence.” He purchased 70 film tickets which he then distributed to friends and family. He also screened his own demo footage in order to assess the interest of would-be investors.

But the average entrepreneur is concerned only with the likelihood of profit, so Chi was left somewhat dejected by the encounter. There was one friend, however, who did not refuse him: Grace Wan, CEO of Tai­pei-based Arteck Design and Consulting.

“Let’s film a Taiwanese Home, something that can showcase the feelings toward this land of ours,” Chi proposed. The sentiment immediately resonated with this passionate woman, someone who had started her business at the tender age of 28, and who had been a benefactor to dozens of children each year. She was the biggest contributor to the NT$30 million that she, Chi, and others poured into the creation of a new film company, but even that was only enough capital to procure the necessary film equipment.

It took a full six months to overcome all of the bureaucratic hurdles involved with purchasing the equipment from the United States, which finally arrived in summer of 2010. It was an entire aerial film system that filled eight boxes, each weighing 40–50 kilos. The purchase of the gear left nothing behind for the NT$100,000-plus-an-hour helicopter rental. But an infusion of NT$5 million from the Government Information Office (now disbanded) as a subsidy for digital upgrades proved to be the proverbial stitch in time, and before commencing the shoot, Chi first headed off to San Diego, California, to receive training in aerial film.

“The degradation of the environment isn’t going to slow down while we’re getting our act together, and Chi’s strength, vision, and focus aren’t going to somehow improve as he gets older. We started the company; the financing and the rest we’ll just figure out as we go along,” says Wan.

In 2011, the Delta Electronics Foundation, long a champion of environmental causes, came forth with money sufficient to cover the entire first year of filming, paving the way for other organizations such as the Wistron Foundation, the International Commercial Bank of China Cultural and Educational Foundation, and the Fubon Cultural & Educational Foundation, all of which followed suit with sizeable donations.

As of this writing, Taiwan’s first-ever completely aerial film has been two years in production. Making it has required a slew of highly specialized equipment, such as a camera lens capable of rotating 360 degrees mounted underneath the helicopter, and the camera itself which relays information instantaneously to the cabin of the aircraft, where from his roost behind the pilot, Chi mans a control console to make minute adjustments to the lens angle and aperture, composition and other variables. The work requires keenness of vision, finesse and manual dexterity.

According to Chi, he’s logged around 400 hours of flight time thus far to bring the film to its present 90% completion. The film, which will run about 100 minutes, has been given a working title, Yu­wang (literally “territory view,” but also a pun on “desire”). There is great excitement and anticipation as it is poised to enter the postproduction phase on its way to a projected release date in the second half of 2013.

For the soundtrack he enlisted Singaporean Ricky Ho, best known to Taiwanese as the composer of Seediq Bale’s score. In addition, Fan Qin­hui, the screenwriter who won a best script award at the Golden Bells for the documentary Ku­ro­shio, is penning the narration to be used as a voice-over. Chi’s declared purpose is to juxtapose the images of Taiwan’s beauty along with her less comely facets, each in equal proportion. Interspersed throughout are individual stories, all of which he hopes will make viewers come away reflecting on their relationship to their native land, regardless of which side, the beautiful or the ugly, holds the greatest fascination for them.

While maintaining the same high-altitude perspective on Taiwan, he’s swapped his erstwhile silent, still photographs for a more dynamic presentation in film. At 50, he’s branched off in a novel direction, delving into virgin territory. In midlife, it’s a rare man who dispenses with the tools that have made his reputation; of the martial artists of folklore, it was said that one should never change weapons before combat. Yet Chi has done just that, sounding a bold challenge to both the world of film and society at large.