Every emergency landing field had a rotating beacon mounted on a 50-foot tower. Small acetylene gas beacons, visible for 10 miles, were installed at three-mile intervals. Magee, an illumination engineer, to organize a viable lighting system along the airmail routes. Egge, general superintendent of the Airmail Service, worked with J. To save the service, postal officials had to make night flying a reality by providing lighted airways. Learn more about Knight's remarkable flight »īeacon light on display in the National Postal Museum, seen through the wings of a DeHavilland DH-4 aircraft. Knight's remarkable flight captured national attention and helped push for successful funding of airmail service. Knight ended up flying the mail all the way into Chicago, flying much of the way over unfamiliar ground at night, and in a snowstorm. Mail was flown to North Platte, Nebraska, where Jack Knight was scheduled to fly the next segment. One of the eastbound flights, piloted by William Lewis, crashes near Elko, Nevada. The westbound flights turned back in horrible snowstorms. On February 21, 1921, the Post Office Department sent out two planes in each direction, west to east and east to west. If mail moved only slightly faster by air than by train, few in Congress would be persuaded to fund the service. To institute coast-to-coast airmail service, postal officials had to show Congress that round-the-clock flying was possible. At it's fastest, transcontinental airmail service saved less than 2 days over mail sent the entire distance by train. The next morning the bags were put back on the nearest mail airplane to continue their journey. Mailbags were routinely removed from airplanes at night and placed on mail trains, which sped them on their way. In the early days of airmail service, the lack of ground lighting made night flying impossible. After September 8, 1920, airmail was flown across country, from New York to San Francisco. By 1918 it had established service between New York and Chicago. The Post Office Department's ultimate goal was to provide coast-to-coast airmail service. Hopson was killed on October 18, 1928, when his plane exploded in mid-air. Air Mail Service, Hopson signed on with National Air Transport on Contract Air Mail Route #17, flying between New-York and Chicago. Recent political upheavals in Chile have rendered the exhibition an example of the cyclical nature of geopolitical instability in the face of social injustice and inequality.Pilot "Wild Bill" Hopson was one of several pilots who carried the mail across country night and day in February 1921. Confronting the viewer with a direct gaze, these photographs are vivid moments in which the power of the state upon a subject is fixed and inscribed, and uncomfortable examples of the ethnographic gaze, through which indigenous populations were ‘possessed’ by their colonizers.
#Airmail calendar series#
Included are works from the series Historia del rostro (History of the Human Face) (ongoing), which bear faces drawn by the artists’ daughter in stark juxtaposition with mug shots and portraits of indigenous Chileans.
#Airmail calendar manuals#
Gleaned from newspapers, magazines, drawing manuals and books, each is selected, as Dittborn states, because they “amazed, disturbed, frightened, and sometimes tickled me.” Unfolded now across the decades, each acts as a document of different moments in both Dittborn’s personal history, and Chilean history – coming into direct and provocative contact across the pictorial plane. Originally using brown Kraft paper, Dittborn later moved to fabric, across which surfaces he reproduces found images, texts and drawings. Works have been selected to span different media employed across Dittborn’s oeuvre, as well as film works that are less often exhibited. Folded in the fragility of an envelope, the process of which provides the works with their distinctive 16-part grid, the moment of their opening and display produces large-scale effect from the slightest of means – a guerrilla claim for space by an artist knowingly outside of the ‘centre’, and not without humour. Includes historical and new works, sent to the gallery using couriers, honouring his renowned use of airmail.Since the 1980s, Dittborn’s large-scale works which bear found images and texts, have been folded and dispatched in airmail envelopes to galleries worldwide, surmounting restrictions of movement created by national borders, oppressive governments, and geographical distance.Ĭrossing impermeable national borders and traversing international networks of mail distribution, his works powerfully transcend the spatial barriers between the Global South and the western world, tracing the lines of colonial histories of subjugation and exploitation, and the cultural hegemony of western art history. The first exhibition of Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn’s work in the UK since 1993.