Traffic In The Sky

In light of my recent photography binge, and in anticipation of a miserable 22 hour flight home, I thought I'd post an old project from my foundation semester -- nothing less than my first in-depth experience with 35mm film.

Our brief, if I remember correctly, was to document an environment in the manner of a character study. I chose the Kingsford-Smith airport and ended up shooting with a roll of drugstore 400ISO Kodak film -- both decisions mandated by the imminence of the deadline rather than actual preference. Fortunately, everything turned out nicely.


A lot of people have a preconception of the airport as a transitory stop rather than a location in and of itself, but I wanted to depict it as a place of permanence. Wandering around the terminals, I became fixated on all the people that didn't have a destination to rush off to -- the throwers and runway operators standing around having a smoke and a chat; the security officers and desk staff; basically anyone who wasn't a passenger. Capturing that hidden population became my goal.


This was really the first time that I shot anything with a sense of purpose or direction. I remember flipping through a big book of Pulitzer Prize-winning photo essays as a kid and becoming enamored with that kind of journalistic storytelling and I think that definitely influenced the way I approached this assignment. At the very least, it explains my aversion to posed subjects and staged photography.


Looking back on this project, it's clear to me that it has had a long lasting impact on my overall approach to photography. Not only in regards to the environmental fixation that's still evident in my recent work, but also in terms of how I tend to read people as descriptive extensions of their surroundings rather than characters in their own right. I'm not sure why, but in a strange antithesis of my painting practice, I tend to shy away from focusing on any recurring individuals within my photos.

(Couple of outtakes)

I suppose the reason that I like using a camera is because it offers such a refreshing change of pace from painting -- not just on a technical level, but also in terms of conceptual approach. For me, photography is much more about telling a story than conveying an abstract idea. Maybe I'll have an idea of what I want to achieve, but conceptual doctrine doesn't play nearly as big a part in the process. And aside from time of day/year and actual physical location, personal context is an irrelevant factor. Because the mechanics of clicking a shutter button are nowhere near as open-ended as the concept of moving a brush, all I have to do is walk around until I find something interesting. It's therapeutic.