This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
Between 2012 and 2019, Mark Steinmetz photographed Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, shooting nearly every publicly accessible part of it, including inside the planes themselves. Instead of the typically triumphalist images delivered by airlines and tourist bureaus we’re accustomed to, Steinmetz’s images are attenuated by a feeling of distance and an eerie sense of space. They are, in a word, strange.
Credit: Courtesy of Nazraeli Press
Credit: Courtesy of Nazraeli Press
This is perhaps fitting in a period of air travel that’s not only six decades beyond the era when flying was an event to be celebrated in itself, but also in a post-9/11 world in which air travel has become irreducibly stranger. And lonelier. No longer can loved ones keep us company until the very moment we enter the plane or greet us the moment we step off the gangway.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Sixty-three images from Steinmetz’s series have been collected and reprinted as duotone plates in “ATL,” Steinmetz’s most recent book, published by Nazraeli Press. The book includes an introduction by Gregory J. Harris, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Steinmetz, who is based in Athens, has photographed Atlanta before. “Greater Atlanta,” which spanned from 1994 to 2009, features similarly eerie images of eccentric, abandoned objects and isolated strangers against a backdrop of Atlanta’s vast ocean of concrete and kudzu. In some ways, “ATL” is an epilogue to this work, as well as to similar bodies of work focused on Cleveland, Paris and Los Angeles that the photographer has undertaken.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
But perhaps the closest analog to “ATL” is to be found in his “Summer Camp” series (1986-2003). Unlike the subjects in “Greater Atlanta” and the other cities, the subjects in “Summer Camp” — awkward and rambunctious tweens and teenagers — are all away from home. None are navigating personal spaces of comfort and familiarity, but are instead captured in places where social rules have to be customized to a new environment.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
As at a summer camp, the social rules of an airport must accommodate the rules of multiple points of origin. Its spaces must accommodate multiple time zones, multiple languages and multiple norms of behavior all at once. The result is often the kind of silence and solitude so evident in Steinmetz’s images. In these photos, people and objects are sequestered in the quiet bubbles of their own realities. And even the roar of the planes’ engines have been rendered mute and untouchable.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
Credit: Photo courtesy of Mark Steinmetz
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Cinqué Hicks is editor-in-chief of ArtsATL.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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