You float above a garden in Belgium. There’s not a soul in sight. In another picture a group of men stare up at you from the entrance of a church, eyes squinting in the sun. In another you drift across a charred landscape, black and scabbed, as if the desert has bubbled up in blisters. A caption by the user who uploaded the photo on to Dronestagr.am, Eric Hanscom, says: “I was at a seminar a while back where a man from the military explained that his strategy for drones was to put a drone in harm’s way before he would put a person. I took the same approach with my Bebop over the mud volcanoes of the Salton sea.”

Bebop is a consumer multirotor aircraft, a personal drone, and sites such as Dronestagr.am allow users to upload and share photographs and videos taken using their drones. The images on Dronestagr.am are mostly scenes of natural beauty: grand vistas, panoramic shots of beaches and red-roofed villages tucked between rolling hills. These photos are charted across a world map on the front page of the website, clustered around Europe, North America and South East Asia. There are very few photographs on the website from the Middle East.

Aside from Hanscom’s brief mention of military tactics, there is no trace on Dronestagr.am of drone warfare. These are drones in the growing commercial sense of the word, as luxury gadgets with grand, cinematic appeal.

Likewise, British NGOs’ current use of drones in Nepal to assess earthquake damage and in search-and-rescue missions illustrates their humanitarian possibilities.

Dronestagr.am recently partnered with the NYC Drone Film Festival. National Geographic sponsored the website’s annual competition in 2014. There are channels on Vimeo dedicated to “dronies”, selfies taken using drones. On YouTube, a recent video of a man running to save his drone from a watery grave has garnered millions of views. South Park even dedicated an episode to the subject.

Coral Garden by Marama on Dronestagr.am. Photograph: Dronestagr.am

At the same time, drone warfare is in the headlines. There are regular strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. Recently it was reported that a US drone strike killed an American and an Italian citizen held captive by al-Qaida. With two faces of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) developing side by side, what exactly do we talk about when we talk about drones?

The founder of Dronestagr.am, Eric Dupin, makes a clear distinction between the 400g multirotor vehicles used by drone photographers and military drones like the MQ-9 Reaper, which has a maximum take-off weight of more than 4,500kg. “People still tend to get confused between ‘bad drones’ (drones with warfare or surveillance purposes) and ‘good drones’ (drones to help people and show the beauty of the world),” he says. “But I’m confident in the fact that it will probably change when people take personal drones for what they are: smart flying cameras that take stunning images of their surroundings.”

It’s important to do our bit to make sure that drones are seen in a positive light, as a content creation tool

This tension between good and bad drones is evidently a frustration for many drone enthusiasts. In 2014, Joanne McNeil and Ingrid Burrington reported on a Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York where an audience member accused the panel members of “racism towards drones”.



Said “drone-ism” involves tarring personal drones with the same brush used to judge military drones: something that, according to drone enthusiasts, shows ignorance towards the history and culture of the technology. Are these frustrations grounded? Is it unfair to speak about drone warfare in the same breath as drone photography? Don’t drone owners, after all, just want to take nice photos?

After clicking through his photos of mud volcanoes, I contacted Eric Hanscom and asked why he was so drawn to taking pictures with drones. “With drones, you can get much closer to an object and see it as though you were a bird,” he explains. “You can use a helicopter to get many of the shots you can take from a drone, but helicopters can cost thousands of dollars per hour. If you get a helicopter 18 inches above a flowering saguaro cactus, the flower will be blow to bits well before you can get the picture.”

Light, agile, unmanned; UAVs can go places that would otherwise be too expensive or dangerous to reach. Dupin goes so far as to say that they offer a whole new framework for photographers to work within. “It is not selfies or ground photography, it’s a new pictorial language. When you are piloting a drone and you get photos and videos, in some way it’s like you’re a bird or a plane pilot. You can see your house, your district, your city or a landscape like you’ve never seen it.”

Anyone who’s spent a substantial amount of time looking at their roof on Google Earth will understand the appeal of peering down at your surroundings. Seeing streets you know from an aerial perspective can be enjoyably defamiliarising, but there’s a tension here between the freeing bird’s-eye view that both Dupin and Hanscom espouse and the tactical language of surveillance.

Members of the British NGO Serve On guide a drone above Chautara, Nepal. Photograph: Jessica Lea/DFID

I don’t think there was ever much of a public perception of the military ones before the civilian ones arrived

Surveillance is a word that tends to go along with “bad drones”, and there have been a number of recent news stories where good drones have been shown that they are capable of acting bad. Last week alone, French police investigated a number of personal drones that were seen to fly over several sensitive landmarks in Paris, and in a separate case a personal drone laced with radiation landed on the office of Japan’s prime minister.

The association of drones with destructive weapons is hard to shake. Type dronestagram on to Google and the first result you get will be the photosharing site. The second result will be a project, also called Dronestagram, which shows the locations of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. This site was founded by the British writer and artist James Bridle in 2012, a year before the creation of the photo-sharing site. Bridle uses records drawn from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and images from Google Maps to chart the sites of drone attacks and upload them as they occur to Instagram.

“Drones have been increasingly common in warfare for over a decade now, but it took them quite a while to reach public awareness,” Bridle explains.

“And this really coincided with the rise of civilian drones – that is, remote-controlled aircraft capable of hovering, carrying cameras and so on. I don’t think there was ever much of a public perception of the military ones before the civilian ones arrived. It’s happened very quickly in the public imagination. For those of us who’ve been studying them for longer, it’s been a sudden change.”

This rise of drones in the public imagination looks set to continue. For the past few years, personal drone ownership has largely been the territory of wealthy hobbyists, but, as the technology becomes cheaper and more readily available, there are a growing number of companies looking to tap into the mass-market potential of drones. One prominent example is Zano, developed by British technology firm Torquing Group. Controlled by a smartphone, Zano aims to greatly increase the accessibility of aerial photography. It managed to raise more than £2 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter with the tagline “Taking your selfies to new heights”.

“A lot of stories in the media about drones are about the obvious connotations of what’s happening in Palestine with drone attacks,” says Reece Crowther, marketing and business director of Torquing Group. “Bearing in mind that all of that is so far removed from consumer drone technology, for us it’s important to do our bit to make sure that drones are seen in a positive light, as a content creation tool.”

Bali Barat by Capungaero on Dronestagr.am. Photograph: Dronestagr.am.

Crowther says that in addition to taking photos, there is the scope for drones like Zano to be used in disaster areas to help locate survivors, to inspect buildings, to find people lost at sea. “Zano really is 10-15 per cent of what the actual platform is capable of doing,” says Crowther. “When we first envisioned Zano, we had this great technology platform, this autonomous intelligent swarming drone, and we thought, how do we bring this to a consumer? But there’s also the other 85 per cent of the platform: it’s a highly intelligent inspection tool. It can carry payloads. It can be used for thermal imaging.”

The benefits are numerous, but you don’t have to look far to see the flipside.

As well as Zano, Torquing Group are also developing a number of other models. These include Swift, which according to their website “provides an ultra-transportable immediate situational awareness solution for military and law enforcement as well as industrial and urban inspection”. There’s also the Sparrow model, which has “military, law enforcement, civilian or industrial applications” and a model called Firecrest, the only details of which are that it is “for military applications”.

It may be easy to draw a mental line between a 400g camera and a 4,500kg weapon but, as the capabilities and uses of smaller drones increase, the division between good drones and bad drones seems to become progressively harder to follow. Will this cloud our understanding of what drones are and aren’t capable of doing? Does it make drone warfare more tangible in the West, or does it distance us further from the military use of UAVs?

“I think the latter is what happens more often, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” says Bridle. “This entanglement of the domestic and the military highlights the connections between surveillance and violence, between personal privacy and public agency, which are necessary to discuss and illustrate in both contexts.”

The perspective of the drone is a perspective of surveillance; of over-watch.

In Drone Theory, the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou talks about drones and kamikazes as being on opposite extremes of conflict. “Whereas the kamikaze implies a total fusion of the fighter’s body and weapon, the drone ensures their radical separation. The kamikaze: My body is a weapon. The drone: My weapon has no body.”

Above the photographer, the drone watches without a body. The eye it looks out from is its own. Perhaps this is what makes the pictures of towns and fields, no matter their beauty, seem ghost-like.

There’s a picture on Dronestagr.am of a graveyard in Astorville, Ontario. The snow is so deep that it reaches the tops of the headstones. The next photo is beside a grave where the snow is low enough to read the names of the dead.

From the perspective of the photo you must be kneeling, but there are no footprints on the snow.