Pilot Chris Boyer’s aerial photography shows the way we use our land.

By Scott McMillion
 hris Boyer has a thing about junkyards. Flying at low
elevation across Montana, you or I would likely dwell
on the prairie undulations or jagged riverine breaks,
the erose peaks or that great big sky we’ve entered.
Boyer marvels at all that, too. But he also focuses on the
junk, the atolls of our discards that speckle the land. He takes
special interest in these monuments to our ethic of disposal
and replacement, miniscapes that, if left alone, will disappear
only at the speed of rust.

Bridger Ridge, Chris Boyer, Lima Bay.

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 When Chris Boyer sees a junk pile, chances are he’ll bank
his plane and move in for a better look, observe its shapes,
see how it fits into the landscape, and document what he sees
with his cameras.
“I just can’t stay away from them,” he said of our collec-
tions of abandoned things.
Then he showed me a picture. It was a map of Montana,
cast in busted Pontiacs, decrepit Chryslers and pickups torn
apart in the kind of night people try to forget. Look closely at
this map and you see, right where the city of Great Falls ought
to be, what looks like a U-Haul truck. Its life played out under
the steerage of strangers, it now awaits scavengers looking for

Top: Fort Benton, Blue Pool.

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a cheap carburetor, an axle that’s maybe not too bent.
It was an accident, Boyer said, the making of this picture.
He’d spotted a wrecking yard near Silver Star—which is an
awful pretty place—lying alongside the Jefferson River in the
morning shadows of the Tobacco Root Mountains. Clearly,
there’s a lot to look at around there, but it was the junk that
caught his eye. So he flew over it, pressing his shutter release
as he passed, hoping for good results.
Later, processing his images, he liked them enough to
print some postcards from them. When he took one to the post
office, the clerk glanced at it upside down and said, “Oh. It’s
a map of Montana.”
Top: Eight Cars, Car Map.

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 Boyer, in the air,
was drawn by colors and shapes and his own curiosity.
 Left: Cowboys. Above: Combining.

“I hadn’t seen it,” Boyer said. But there it was: an outline of the state in rusting steel and tarnished
chrome, the crest of the Rockies clearly defined, the Idaho border carved by whitewater, even Highway 2
reaching flat and straight from Glacier Park to Culbertson. Boyer had printed the photo because he liked
the way it looked, and he’d studied it for some time, but not from the proper angle.
The story of that photo tells us something about how perspective accumulates upon itself. The junk-
yard is somebody’s place of business and the wreckage was placed for some grounded reason other than
mapmaking. Boyer, in the air, was drawn by colors and shapes and his own curiosity. But it took a friendly
postal clerk to spot Montana in the image. Viewers, like you and I, now can make of it what we will: mere
amusement, an odd coincidence of shape and form, or a statement on the condition of Montana.
The way Boyer describes his work, many of his best photos are happy accidents, though I suspect
that, like the rest of us, the harder he works, the luckier he gets.
Boyer takes two kinds of photos: oblique and vertical. The oblique shots are taken with a handheld
camera pointed out his airplane window. His vertical ones are more difficult, since the camera is mounted
in the belly of his cherry-red 1957 Cessna, and he has no viewfinder to help compose his pictures. When
he sees something he wants to shoot, he flies over it, thumb on the button of his shutter release cable,
and hopes for the best.
“It’s kind of like an old fashioned bombing run,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I get one striking abstract or
creative image per flight.”
Aerial photography is not a new thing. Pilots have been snapping pictures for as long as they’ve
had airplanes and, over time, it’s evolved into a science. Big airplanes with precise calibrations take

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 Red Rock River.
aerial shots critical to mapmakers, urban planners and the
military.
Boyer, 42, does this more technical work, and it is good
and valuable for people who design highways and trout
streams. But he is also doing something altogether different,
an approach that illustrates the human use of landscape. The
results can be almost magical.
One shot offers particular mysteries. It shows a collection
of clotted things, but what is it? Ice in a mud puddle? Some
foulness in a petri dish?
It’s none of those. It’s merely ice forming in a reservoir
near Harrison, spreading outward from the shallow spots in
the five-acre pool. But when Boyer presents the image, it’s a
splendid puzzle until you look at the title.
“That’s the abstract element of the vertical,” Boyer
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explained. “It’s beyond mapmaking.”
Boyer grew up on the East Coast and attended Vassar
College, which he described as a place “highly favorable to a
young straight guy.” But he spent his summers on a Wyoming
dude ranch where, as a young man, he started thinking about
the interaction between 20th century human life and the wild
places that remain. He wrote his senior thesis on recreational
development in the modern West.
Then he attended graduate school at Oregon State
University, where he learned to fly in a student program, and
then settled in Bozeman, where he went to work doing stream
restorations and eventually started his own company.
Now, his business is in the air, where he takes a real close
look at what we do to landscapes.
His most famous photograph is of the Red Rock River
 Boyer’s work makes you think about what we do to the West and what it does to us.

sidewinding through the Centennial Valley, perhaps the least
touched of Montana’s big valleys. The picture looks like a
desert landscape, a foreground composed of sunshine and
bare, red earth. But the ground is exposed because sooner
or later it won’t be. The photo shows the belly of a reservoir
shriveled by drought; a place people covered with deep
water so they could then alter downstream landscapes. It’s
a stunningly beautiful shot, but it’s a manufactured land-
scape, like so much of our world.
Boyer’s work makes you think about what we do to the
West and what it does to us.
A ridgetop trophy home consumes more than the ground
beneath it: It claims the viewshed all around for its owner.
From the air, urban Butte sparkles with a cleanliness
you don’t see at ground level, and the toxic waters in the
bottom of a mine pit shine like a buffed-up robin’s egg.
Cow paths and construction sites, overgrazed pastures,
ripened fields and the leapfrog sprawl that accommodates
Bozeman’s middle class. A mountain of tires tucked into
a coulee. The junkyards you can find behind most ranch
houses. The turned-up prairies that provide our bread
and noodles and beer. Boyer documents it all. And while
the work offers no judgments, it’s clearly about us—all of
us—our tastes and habits, our garbage and monuments, the
things we create and destroy with our opposable thumbs.
We’re here for the long haul, the work tells us. We’re
not going away.
Boyer, with his airplane and his camera, gives us a new
way to think about what kind of marks we leave.
Chris Boyer’s aerial photography can be seen on his
Web site at www.kestrelaerial.com BSJ

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