STATE OF TRANSIT (2021)

GENRE: Experimental Photography. MEDIUM: Long-exposure. YEAR: 2021. PROCESS: Pinhole camera, 14 day exposure.

This is the first photo from the State of Transit project. It is a single long exposure photo taken over the course of two weeks and captures the flight patterns of aircraft landing at the Manhattan Regional Airport in Kansas, which sits approximately one mile behind where the camera was fixed. (September 29-October 13, 2021)

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

In October of 2019, I visited Kansas and brought with me a few beer can pinhole cameras, thinking it would be an interesting experiment to put them up and see what I got. This type of camera is designed to gather light over long periods of time, from days to months, even years. This camera was placed on a fence looking out onto the hills, which happens to also be right on the flight path of the local regional airport, about a mile away.

I hadn’t been expecting much from the experiment, perhaps a blurry photo of the hills, or a bit of the sun passing. What I got was a beautiful abstract photo showing the trails of aeroplanes made by the light bouncing off the white exteriors of the aircraft, as they passed over the hills, coming towards and over the camera.

What really surprised me was the number of trails in the photo. Even though I could see and hear the planes overhead, seeing evidence of how many there were got me thinking. There are planes flying over us, all the time, always present, yet completely in the background as we go about our lives. Worldwide, there is an average of 9,728 planes in the air carrying 1,270,406 passengers at any given time, which is difficult to grasp, the scale easily fades into the background of our minds and becomes an abstraction itself.

The unexpected result of this experiment has inspired me to document more. What would it look like to photograph larger airports? Smaller? Individual runways? The paths overhead? What patterns would we see?

The State of Transit project aims to visually represent the abstraction of air traffic in a series of single long-exposure images - effectively using the abstract to illustrate the abstract, and in doing so, making it more concrete.