Sudbury Department, Sudbury Aqueduct, Echo Bridge, from Needham toward Newton, downstream face, Needham; Newton, Mass., ca. 1878

Born in 1825 in Francestown, New Hampshire, James Wallace Black was a pioneering American photographer, best known for his aerial photographs of Boston taken from a hot air balloon in 1860. Black began his career as a portrait photographer in Boston in the 1840s and later became an accomplished landscape photographer, capturing the scenery and architecture of New England. In 1860, Black teamed up with Samuel Archer King to take a series of aerial photographs of Boston from a hot air balloon. The resulting images, published in the Boston Journal, are considered some of the earliest and most important examples of aerial photography. Black continued to work as a photographer throughout his life and was also involved in the development of photographic equipment and processes. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1896, leaving behind a legacy as one of America's most important early photographers.