Planes / Frank Schramm

This series of work began in August 1989 and was inspired by the early aviation photographs by the French photographers André Kertész and Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

My pursuit was to chase down the landings and takeoffs of “heavies” of, contemporary commercial aircraft, as they lift their massive bodies into and out of the sky. L-1011′s, DC-10′s, A-300′s, 747′s, and the Concorde.

My obsession began at JFK international Airport and included La Guardia, Newark, Miami, Ronald Regan National Airport, Washington DC, Charles de Gaulle, Paris, and Kloten, Zurich.

As a child, traveling on highways and witnessing low flying jets cruising noisily very close overhead near Newark Airport on road trips to New York City with my family, I was captivated by the catapulting of an oversize machine bigger than a large house shadowing over our car as we passed through tollbooth near the airport.

Later, after a year into the project, I began to realize that machines where flying all the time over my head…. I wondered about the mysteries of what was going on inside these fuselage bodies catapulted into the skies flying over 500 miles an hour. At times I felt like I owned the sky, and the more times I stood under these gigantic machines, the more obsessed I became about witnessing the frequency with which these fragile bodies of aviation occupied the spaciousness of the sky.

Frank Schramm