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.
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.
