From April 7 through May 6, Viewpoint will feature the aerial photography of Robert Hartman, who uses color infrared film to transform our human-altered landscape into a compelling combination of abstraction and surreal geography, and William Garnett, whose black-and-white photographs were among the first to demonstrate the artistic possibilities of aerial photography.

Individually, Robert Hartman’s photographs have an unusual beginning: in a tightly circling airplane, with the California landscape passing below at 80 or 90 miles per hour. For years he flew solo, the control stick between his knees while he photographed. Now, in his 70s, he photographs while someone else pilots.

Collectively, Hartman’s photographs began with his years as an abstract expressionist painter and as a professor of art at UC Berkeley. Characterized by bold graphics and surprising colors, Hartman’s prints may at first seem to be paintings. Even when they’re seen to be photographs, the subjects “hover between recognition and mystery,” he says.

Hartman, whose love of flying predates his painting and his photography, finds his images in the terrestrial environment he leaves behind. “Down on the ground you’re in a maze you can’t really grasp,” he says, but from above “the maze gives up its secrets.” It is the secrets of what man has done on the surface of his planet that find their way into Hartman’s photographs. “There always needs to be evidence of human activity when I photograph, otherwise the subject is too elusive. While that activity can be either exhilarating or terribly depressing, visual excitement is my primary concern.”

A selection of Robert Hartman’s recent work appears in Solo Flights, the catalog of his exhibit at the Oakland Museum.

Complementing Hartman’s color images is a selection of black-and-white prints by William Garnett, Hartman’s friend and colleague from UC Berkeley. Garnett, who turns 90 this year, has been awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships, and his work has been collected in several books, including William Garnett: Aerial Photographs.