Best of the Decade: #7 Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Photo by François Lagarde, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #7 pick – Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision" (April 19, 2010).

“Angle of Vision” is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker pieces. It’s a profile of the aerial photographer George Steinmetz. Here’s what I said about it when it originally appeared:

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “In dreams – mine, at least – flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.”

“Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next section describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth part takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check. [The New Yorker & Me, May 7, 2010]

All this still applies. “Angle of Vision” is “a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story.” Collins’s “unhesitating willingness to write in the ‘I’ – to present her stories as personal experiences” is what I love about her work. That “parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow” is inspired! For all these reasons, “Angle of Vision” is my #7 pick.