| dc.description.abstract | During the years following the second world war a particular form of photographic image circulated in Norway. These images were oblique aerial images (skråfotografi) taken by the company Widerøe. From hamlet to street, from fjord to forest, the country was seen from a stimulating new vantage point that showed a heterogenous but holistic nation. Allowing the viewer to see above the valley or beyond the forested margins of their farm or community and perceive the nation from a wider perspective. My ambition in this thesis is to show the multiple roles and meanings of different forms of aerial images by finding common ground between the view from the ground and view from above that show aerial images as more than just instruments of modernity. Starting from the vertical image as tool used to register, map, and redesign the Norwegian landscape in order to facilitate the creation of an ordered and rational agricultural landscape and then zooming down to the low oblique view of individual farms, I aim to show the ambiguity of these images in a time of rural transition. Through a case study of the use of aerial images in Naustdal, I explain how the rugged terrain, history and intricate property structure of Norway forced the aerial image down to ground through the need for field analysis, use of local land records and the creation of statistical knowledge. From this surface emerged new demands for depicting the social space of rural communities. I detail in this study how the high-altitude oblique image functioned in the visual stabilization of social space. By showing how the distance of the oblique view allow for patterns of inhabitation to be visible and systematized, I argue that the high-altitude oblique view created a common ground between ruralism and urbanism, that allowed for a unified image of an industrial welfare state to emerge. With a new agricultural landscape and a new way of seeing rural communities, the self-representations of the individual farmer also changed through the low altitude oblique image of individual farms. This thesis conducts a case-study of the use of low altitude oblique views in the community of Selbu to show how the images took part in the implementation of mental and social changes to rural communities in the deployment of an agroeconomic program aimed at the individual farmer. These images both display the new technical role of the farmer as well the shifting status of the landscape as inhabitation. However, this thesis also shows how in oblique images of individual farms the landscape attains a new visibility that refuses the dichotomy between modernity and tradition. I conclude that aerial images cannot be read or seen independently from the ground it represents, and that aerial images, from the vertical view as a tool of modernity, to low oblique views of individual farms, all constitute a unified body of images. | nob |