Aircraft – The Jet as Art – Jeffrey Milstein
Monday, 4 February 2008
It’s ‘aircraft porn’ a keen photographer and aviation enthusiast insisted, just like those glossy coffee table food books and celebrity chef tomes have been defined as food porn. Jeffrey Milstein set himself up with a large format camera directly below or beside the final approach on to an assortment of runways and photographed aircraft from head on, from the side but most often from directly below, just before they touched down. Then lots of PhotoShop work disappeared the backgrounds to leave the aircraft isolated in white and meticulously detailed, like a hefty shot of hyper-realism.
Flying in to Lusaka, Angola
The double foldout of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340 in the middle of the book is a highlight, but I like the contrast between glossy, highly polished aircraft and others which look a little oil-streaked, a little timeworn. It would be nice to see a contrasting collection from some developing world airport where the arrivals and departures are nearly all slightly battered airliners past their first world use-by-date, questionable Russian cargo aircraft and the odd executive jet clearly up to no good. When I flew into Lusaka in Angola a couple of years ago the aircraft at that busy airport all fitted one of those descriptions
