A Mosaic of Change : Collection of Aerial Photos Relates State’s Dramatic Story

Tucked away on the second floor of the Whittier College science building is a series of puzzles like no others. The pieces number in the tens of thousands and, if assembled all at once, they would tell a story of dramatic change spanning nearly four decades.

The puzzle pieces are photographs and negatives, about 411,000 of them, that make up the bulk of the Fairchild aerial photography collection. This rare group of photos--taken during countless flights over California and much of the Far West--is one of the most comprehensive aerial collections in existence today outside the federal government.

Geologists study it to trace earthquake faults, attorneys refer to it to settle property line disputes, oil experts examine it for signs of new deposits and highway builders look at it to plot new routes through mountains and crowded urban areas.

“It is unique among aerial collections in the U.S.,” said Gerald Greenberg, regional director of the National Cartographic Information Center in Menlo Park, a federal unit charged with cataloguing thousands of maps, charts and aerial photos annually. “To get a sense of history there’s nothing like it, unless you build a time machine.”

Pioneered in the ‘20s

The value of the collection stems in large part from its age, said Dallas Rhodes, keeper of the collection and a geology professor at Whittier College. The photos help show the lay of the land before much of Southern California was bulldozed and paved over.

Although aerial photography is commonplace today, Sherman Fairchild pioneered the art in the early 1920s and produced remarkably detailed sets of images from the air long before others took to the skies with cameras.

As a result, Fairchild’s work is a base line against which more recent aerials are compared to track geologic and urban changes on the ground, particularly in California.

The college, Rhodes said, receives more than 400 requests a year from educators, geologists and landowners to borrow from the collection. Stored in dozens of faded boxes stacked from floor to ceiling in two small rooms, the photos date from 1927 to 1965, the year Fairchild sold his company, Fairchild Aerial Surveys. Soon after the company changed hands, many of the prints were given to three Southern California colleges, including Whittier. When a longtime Fairchild employee discovered that the new owners, Aero Services Inc., planned to dump a large chunk of the collection, he phoned the colleges.

“As the story goes, the photos were literally on a loading dock,” Rhodes said, “waiting for a trip to the dump. This person called (us) and basically said, ‘You’ve got 24 hours, come and get ‘em.’ ”

Whittier retrieved the lion’s share of the collection, nearly 250,000 of the oldest--and most valuable--black-and-white prints. Others went to UCLA, with a smaller number going to what is now California State University, Northridge. Aero Services, a division of Litton Industries Inc., kept about 150,000 photos from the Fairchild collection. The photos were eventually acquired by Teledyne Corp., which last month gave them to the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a move to consolidate the collection, UCLA gave Whittier its share of the Fairchild photos a year ago. Rhodes said there are no further plans to add to Whittier’s aerial archives.

“This collection is a major resource for the entire state of California,” said Rhodes, who oversees a three-student staff that continually sorts and catalogues the photos and handles requests to borrow prints. Rhodes said about 80% of outside inquiries come from engineering companies or geologists. “In a state where earthquakes are a way of life, this collection is a wealth of information.”

Robert Wallace, chief scientist in the U.S. Geological Survey’s office of earthquake studies, agreed.

Earthquake Study

“During the past decade, there has been an intense effort to chart the history of faults in order to predict future earthquakes,” Wallace said from his Menlo Park office. “The Fairchild photos are superb because they show so much without the clutter of the last 40 years of surface degradation--motor bike trails, office buildings, shopping malls and housing tracts. . . . They are essential to the study of earthquakes in this state.”

As a resource, Rhodes said, the photos are significant because of their accuracy. Photos taken from an angle--whether from the ground or in the air--distort or often obscure an aspect of the subject.

But shooting straight down on an area, Rhodes said, allows the viewer to see exactly where a house, beach or rock formation was at a given instant. Over time, as the landscape is altered, that photograph becomes one of the few objective ways to measure change.

The earliest uses of aerial photos underscores their value. Military strategists during World War I, searching for new ways to scout the enemy and monitor troop movements, took to the air with big, bulky cameras.

“If an aerial is good enough, you can see every bomb crater, every trench line and every supply train,” said Rhodes, adding that the first aerial photographs were taken about 1909, about six years after the Wright Brothers went airborne in the first engine-powered craft.

In 1920, Fairchild, then a New York college student, was commissioned by the Army to build a camera that could be mounted under a plane. He was paid $7,000, but the camera wound up costing the eager inventor nearly $40,000 to develop. Soon after, Rhodes said, Fairchild opened an aerial photography company in New York; he set up a Los Angeles office in 1927.

Comprehensive L.A. Series

A year later, Rhodes said, Fairchild completed the most important photographic flight in the collection. Over a period of several months, every square mile of Los Angeles County was filmed. Today, the 1928 aerials are the oldest and most comprehensive of the county.

All told, the collection contains photos from 2,360 flights. Because some records were lost or destroyed, about one-fifth of the Fairchild photos in the Whittier collection are unidentified.

Much of the collection was moved to the Stauffer Science Building a year before a fire on campus leveled Founders Hall, where the photos had been stored, in late 1969. The blaze claimed about 120 rolls of negatives and, with them, the ability to identify many photos and their locations.

Fairchild photographed about 70% of California, Rhodes said, including the steep hillsides of Laguna Beach.

In October, 1978, the walls of one of those picturesque and heavily populated coastal canyons collapsed, destroying 24 homes and causing an estimated $25 million in damage. Within hours of the landslides, private geologists consulted the Fairchild collection to look at old pictures of the area.

“Many of those houses had been built on an old landslide, but because of the development in the area it was impossible to tell the size of that old slide,” Rhodes said. “So the geologists studied some of the early aerials of the area and quickly were able to tell if any more homes were in danger of sliding.”

Tale of 2 Courses

One of the oddest requests to view the collection came recently from the Los Angeles Country Club. Operators of the 75-year-old facility on the Westside wanted to see how golf holes on the two courses had changed through the years, said Adrian Whited, the club’s unofficial historian.

There are two 18-hole courses at the club today, one south of Wilshire Boulevard, the other north of the thoroughfare. “But back in the teens and early ‘20s, there was only one course, and from the photos we can tell Wilshire was just a dirt road,” Whited said. “In fact, the third hole played across Wilshire, making it an interesting drive for the golfer and motorist.”

Although he is not a frequent flyer, Rhodes said that whenever he is airborne, he hauls out his camera and clicks a few frames for his own aerial collection. Sometimes, he said, commercial carriers just don’t cooperate with amateur shutterbugs.

“My biggest complaint about the airlines,” he said, “is they don’t keep the windows clean enough.”