On June 15, 1919, London photographer Arthur A. Gleason (1877-1964) boarded a Curtis “Jenny” airplane to take his first aerial photographs. He would go on to take hundreds more in his decades-long career as a commercial and news photographer.
Thrill features 25 of his aerial photographs which depict London and other southwestern Ontario communities from the early 1940s through to the early 1960s. Each image is a large-scale reproduction of a much smaller print in Museum London’s material culture collection.
Over the years, Gleason used several different cameras to capture his images. He began with a 5 x 7 Graflex, but its shutter speed proved too slow for aerial work. A 4 x 5 Graphic did good work but his last camera, a Fairchild K-20, was even better. This model had been used by the American Air Force during the Second World War (1939-1945).
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