Landing Lights Park (2018)
The camera’s ability to freeze motion to reveal hidden forms, one of the earliest properties of fascination for the medium, still holds true for me in illuminating an essentially universal experience in an unexpected way. Landing Lights Park looks at the Queens neighborhood that lies beneath the whining roar and shadows of jetliners landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Aircraft descend over Landing Lights Park, a stretch of undeveloped land within the working class neighborhood of East Elmhurst, at intervals as frequent as every 90 seconds and as low as 150 feet above the ground, leaving behind a noxious backdrop of noise and polluted air for residents. My photographs explore this extraordinary intrusion within a landscape of the ordinary.
The project offers a sequence of disorienting photographic collisions. I use the camera to bring stillness to the cacophonous landscape and find meaning in the visual slippages that I encounter: the faces of passengers gazing out their windows as they pass overhead, lumbering planes seemingly stuck in trees or tangled up in wires, and aircraft passing uncomfortably close to residential spaces. Within these suspended moments of descending jetliners there exists the potential for disaster — a deliberate meditation on this precarious moment in American history in which a sense of doom and uncertainty is palpable.
Landing Lights Park was supported by a 2018 Queens Art Fund New Works Grant (funded by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Greater New York Arts Development Fund).
Landing Lights Park was published by ROMAN NVMERALS as a limited-edition photography book with short essays by Gideon Jacobs. A second edition of the book is available for purchase here.
Press:
TIME Magazine: TIME’s 25 Best Photobooks of 2018 (Dec. 20, 2018)
Photo-Eye: David Campany’s favorite book from 2018 (Dec. 19, 2018)
Hyperallergic: Photographing the Daily Roar of Life on a New York City Flight Path (Oct. 8, 2018)
The New York Times: Incredibly Close (and Extremely Loud) (Feb. 15, 2018)