- Who
- Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Good See It
- What
- first first
- Where
- United States (Boston)
- When
The first person known to have taken aerial photographs was Nadar, aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (France) in 1858, but none of his earlier work survived. The oldest aerial photograph in existence is a shot of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, taken by James Wallace Black (USA, 1825–96) from a tethered balloon on 13 October 1860. The image was snapped at c. 2,000 ft (609 m) from the "Queen of the Air" hot-air balloon and was given the name "Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Good See It" by the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. The 18.5 x 16.7-cm (7.2 x 6.5-in) image is in the possession of the Met Museum in New York, USA.
Black titled the image "Balloon View of Boston", but it was renamed by Wendell Holmes as "Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Good See It". It is described by the Met as an "albumen silver print from glass negative".
