Dan Cleary: The Wright Brothers Then and Now

A fresh look at the flying pioneers' achievements

Enjoy this wonderful photographic conversation between the Wright Brothers’ original photography and, after much research, Dan Cleary’s contemporary images inspired by the locations where their efforts took place across the US and into France. “In 2016, I listened to the audio version of David McCullough’s book, The Wright Brothers. It occurred to me that I had never visited Huffman Prairie even though Dayton, Ohio, is my hometown and also the home of the Wright Brothers. (Huffman Prairie is where in 1904 the Wright Brothers began their aeronautical adventures). So I took my camera and visited the site where the brothers perfected flight. Standing alone in the field that day, I felt the past and the present converging, and I could almost see and hear the Wright Brothers’ plane above me.” Dan Cleary

$Flight #85 The original historic image was taken at Huffman Prairie on November 16, 1904, and is so sharp that you can almost see the propeller spinning. On that day, Orville flew a distance of 1,760 feet in 40 seconds or about 30 miles per hour. The Wrights’ original photos were made on glass plates. Often the glass plates cracked, and much of the time, the broken pieces were lost. In this case, both the main image and the fractured part remain. As a photographer, the glass plate’s crack is meaningful because it shows process and product simultaneously.$
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