15 Facts About Marilyn Bridges

Marilyn Christine Bridges was born on 1948 and is an American photographer noted for her fine art black and white aerial photographs of extraordinary ancient and modern landscapes.

Marilyn Bridges has photographed sacred and secular sites in over 20 countries, including Peru, Mexico, France, Britain, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Australia, Namibia, Indonesia and India.

Marilyn Bridges' work has been exhibited in over 300 museums and galleries, including solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Moscow House of Photography in Russia, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the International Center of Photography in New York.

Marilyn Bridges's photographs have been published in major magazines, including Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler, Time, Life, Archaeology, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine.

Marilyn Bridges studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts.

Marilyn Bridges began her career in aerial photography in 1976 in the Peruvian desert.

Marilyn Bridges hired a small airplane to fly over the mysterious Nazca Lines, the largest concentration of earth drawings in the world.

Marilyn Bridges's technique was not yet polished, but the deep shadows, the eloquent light, and sense of time standing unnaturally still were present in every print.

In 1982, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Marilyn Bridges flew in a small single-engine Cessna from New York to the Yucatan, where she photographed ancient Mayan sites, some still partially overgrown by the dense jungle.

Marilyn Bridges returned to Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship and published many of the resulting photographs in her 1991 book Planet Peru: An Aerial Journey Through a Timeless Land.

Closer to home Marilyn Bridges photographed ancient and contemporary sites across the United States, from Pre-Columbian mounds in the Midwest and geoglyphs in California, to lava flows in Hawaii and glaciers in Alaska.

Marilyn Bridges received a grant from the French government to make aerial photographs of historical and contemporary sites in the Calais region to document the changing environment in connection with the Channel Tunnel, as seen in her 1995 book Vue d'Oiseau.

Marilyn Bridges received a similar grant from the Belgian government to document the landscape of Wallonia from the air, resulting in the 1999 book Vol au-dessus de la Wallonie.

Marilyn Bridges has photographed the ruins of classical cities and temples in Greece and Turkey.

Marilyn Bridges uses a medium format film camera, and takes photographs from a small airplane or helicopter with the door removed, usually from an altitude of 300 to 1000 feet.