Icarus Also Flew

Skins?

Though I'm often at a loss for words when talking about my work, I have especially not found the words to talk about this series. I lack even a proper title for them. Ironically, I suspect they might be in more need of some context than a lot of my other work. All I can say for now is that they are all detail shots of aircraft...and that not only can the devil be found in the details, but it is probably also where genius and beauty are found - perhaps even their point of origin. 

The photos are purposefully devoid of details that will identify them to anybody except a those who are intimitaly aquainted with each particular aircraft: engineers who meticulously planned the placement of each seam, workers who placed each rivet, and the pilots and mechanics that noticed the gradual but indelibe marks left by invisible forces (time, gravity, air). I suspect some, if not all of them, also saw some beauty in all that and struggled to explain to others why it was all so beautiful. If succesful, these photo perhaps can serve as a bridge.

Though the contraints of this medium obviously force me to display them all together, try to look at each one alone, and consider it seperate from the rest.

Identified Flying Objects

STS-133 or The Relative Merits of Ceramic over Wax (1/3)

for Amber Weiss

STS-133 or The Relative Merits of Ceramic over Wax (2/3)

I’d like to say I’ve been a “space geek” since I was a little kid, but I wasn’t. Astronaut was never on my “when I grow up” occupations list. I didn’t attend space camp (too expensive), and have never had astronaut ice cream (I suspect it doesn’t really compare to a good gelato). Now, it is the one thing I would like to experience more than anything else. 

It took me a while to figure it out, but I realized I wanted I wanted to photograph a Space Shuttle launch before the program is terminated this summer. This experience had a profound impact on me. While I think the photos below are cool, they fail to describe the experience of being there. In my defense, so does every other photo I’ve ever seen of it. I’m also certain to fail describing it in words. On one hand it is a incredibly graceful event (or at least as graceful as 6.7 million pounds of thrust propelling the weight of 12 semi-trucks into space can be. On the other hand seeing the Shuttle and previous rockets up close, it becomes apparent just how crude these attempts are. Patches of assorted metals, ceramic bricks, pipes, wires, and millions of gallons of the most flammable stuff we can fill up with comprise these bold adventures into an incomprehensibly vast expanse. While it isn’t the picture the PR department at NASA might want to paint, I think it makes the fact that we so often succeed even more amazing. 

With that, I leave you to enjoy these, my attempts, to depict an event that has become so common place that we are want to forget how just how miraculous it is. 

On another note, if you want to order some of these prints you can do so here. While an official fine-art print program is being finalized, I wanted to make these available due to the number of requests for them.

I would like to thank Paul at LensProToGo who (as usual) provided amazing service and gear that would be far too expensive for me to own that made these photos possible. 

For those of you craving technical details. With the exception of the first image, all of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D2x with a 600mm f4 lens (effectively 900mm) or a D3s and the 70-200 and a TC-20 III (effectively 400mm) from NASA causeway. 

 

STS-133 or The Relative Merits of Ceramic over Wax (3/3)

aerials

Sometime in the winter of 2010, I was returning to a snow-covered Chicago (undoubtedly from somewhere much warmer). I've always enjoyed how different our familiar world looks from above (I have been known to spend an inordanite amount of time browsing Google Earth). But this time I was taken aback by the beauty of the snow covered forest preserves surrounding O'Hare Airport. Unfortunately for me, the pilot decided that it was more important to get the 150+ passengers on the ground than to give me more time to photograph the landscape, but I knew I had to return to it. A year later, right after the great blizzard of 2011, I hired a helicopter to take me up and shoot that beautifully pure and abstract landscape.  

after Icarus

Twenty-five years ago, today, my friend and colleague, Chris Williams stayed home "sick" from school and climbed onto his roof to photograph the Space Shuttle Challenger's takeoff. This launch seemed different to him than the rest, and he started photographing it. This is his image of the accident's aftermath. I was 7100 KM away, on the other side of the world and wouldn't hear the tragic news until the next day. I still can't fully articulate or decipher the myriad holds that this event has on me. On a symbolic level there's the destructive collision of our greatest hopes and promise of the collaborative human spirit against our same failings and limitations. Those days, when the figurative towers of Babel fall, always make me weep. Nonetheless, I want to pause to remember and honor those 7 that shared Icarus' pursuit and tragically, in an uncomfortably literal way, his fate. I want to underscore and remember them not for their death, but for their brave incarnation of that dream many of us still carry.  

I'm tempted to close with one of my favorite poems, Falling and Flying, a line of which inspires this blog's name, but instead I close with this one. It was penned decades earlier and it's opening and closing lines were quoted by President Reagan in his eulogy for the Challenger crew:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

                                -John Gillespie Magee, Jr. 

                                 18 August 1941                                                    

 

still falling

I love the annual Air and Water Show in Chicago, but a part of me is still on edge as I hear these awesome machines tear through the sky, and catch the briefest glimpses of them between buildings.

Beware of Jet

Every angel is terrifying. The opening to Rainer Maria Rilke's second elegy is at first shocking to readers accustomed to the Western kitsch depictions or Rococo paintings of angels. There are, however, some things which are so perfectly beautiful, so awe-inspiring, so nearly divinely powerful that we are left unsure how to react to them. Do we bow down and worship, cower in fear, or fight disregarding the futility? Rilke's angels are my jets. Capable of unleashing the power of a 1000 suns, maneuvering with such force as to literally crush their own pilots, and perhaps our highest formulation of form and function, I can't help but think that we've forgotten, confused, or domesticate their iconography in much the same way as those painters. These photos are some of my sketches that re-imagine our relationship to them.

about the title...

 

For over a year, I’ve been searching for a title for one of my photo series on military aircraft. When I spotted this while shooting onboard the USS Intrepid museum, I knew I had found it. While it’s more humorous than the work itself, it seemed too fitting to pass up. The warning is painted in huge 6ft tall letters on the superstructure of the aircraft carrier and actually reads “beware of jet blast intakes and roter props.” However, the structure of the tower forces the “jet” to be painted separately from "blast" as they're divided by a rather large gap. Over and over agin I found myself reading “beware of jet” rather than “beware of jetblast.” I'll be posting some new images from this series next.