[Orville Wright]

Wilbur and Orville Wright (1867-1912; 1871-1948) were keenly aware of the importance of documenting their work photographically; they themselves took pictures of their early experiments with gliders, their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, and subsequent events in the evolution of flying machines. It was inevitable, too, that from the moment of their earliest public demonstration flights in 1908, thousands of spectators would take amateur photographs as proof of the amazing performances they had witnessed.

One can well imagine the excitement with which thirteen-year-old William Mayfield, outfitted with his first camera, witnessed the triumphal homecoming of the Wright brothers as they returned to Dayton, Ohio, in 1909, after touring their Flyer throughout Europe. Only a year later Mayfield would ride alongside Orville Wright and make the first photograph from an airplane, looking down on Huffman Prairie, where the brothers had first flown a practicable airplane in 1905. In the years that followed, Mayfield would photograph many events in the early history of aeronautics as a staff photographer for the "Dayton Daily News."

This photograph shows Orville at the controls of a Wright Model E, a lightweight single-seat aircraft with one propeller behind the wings, first built in 1913 and used especially for exhibition purposes. Mayfield's view of the plane and pilot against a white sky, with no horizon line to provide a sense of orientation, conveys the aircraft's liberation from the laws of gravity in strikingly modern visual terms.