Aerial photos offer perspective on BR’s growth
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ABOVE BATON ROUGE, A PILOT’S VIEW THEN AND NOW
Photos by Fred C. Frey Jr., text by Tom Guarisco
LSU Press, $39.95
Nothing is as constant in Baton Rouge as change. No one knows that better than Fred C. Frey. A former Army pilot and son of an LSU dean, Frey began flying over Baton Rouge and taking pictures in 1962 as part of his real estate development business. He had bought a nice used Hasselblad camera from a local camera store.
As the years passed, Frey continued his flying photography. The camera was a “medium” format model that produced negatives that were much larger and clearer than the more common 35mm format. Frey hung on to his pictures because they showed something historic: the evolution of the city as suburbs grew and businesses came and went and forests disappeared and the downtown slumped then began a recovery.
He knew he had something important. Guarisco recounts all this is a brief but informative introduction to this coffee table photography book. The rest of the book comprises the photos Frey took, divided into five sections treating downtown, LSU, suburban sprawl, industry and institutions (school, hospitals, etc.). Each photo from the 1960s or later is paired side-by-side with a recent image of the same site, also taken by Frey from the air.
The transformations are startling. From the photo that Frey took in May of 1968 to the one he shot in January 2008, the Siegen Lane and Highland Road area was transformed from country meadows and forest to a densely packed, heavily built up mass of houses, businesses, roads and buildings of all sorts. It is difficult to recognize as the same place. That’s the point of Frey’s photographs: it really isn’t the same place. Yes, it’s the same location, but it’s not the same any more than the LSU campus is the same place it was when prehistoric Native Americans were celebrating rituals on the Indian mounds.
It’s a fascinating book. Guarisco introduces each chapter with a clear, eloquent description of what is shown. Taglines beneath each photo further explain the changes from one image to the next. The photos are clear and technically proficient, but not really artistic. That’s not the point of this book. It’s about history. That may be why LSU Press chose to print all the photographs in black and white. Certainly color film was readily available in the 1970s, and most people who used the medium format preferred color transparencies (slides). It seems odd that the newer photos are also in black and white, but perhaps that reflects the fact that Frey was shooting the photos for a commercial purpose and black and white film was more economical to use.
Whatever the reason, it would have been nice to see some color in a book this size and price. There are 150 pages of large black and white photos, and it gets a bit tiring looking at page after page of gray images.
Yet the lack of color has no impact on the historicity of these photos. It’s worth the price for that reason. For Baton Rougeans, seeing some of the vanished landmarks will be like thumbing through an old high school album looking at photos of long lost friends. Seeing the changes might also give a glimpse into where we’re going in the future. Frey thinks so. He’s still up there shooting photos of the ever-expanding Baton Rouge cityscape.
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