AirCraft — The Jet as Art —

Characteristics

Description

Once upon a time, passenger airliners were rare. Families would make special outings to airports to stand on observation decks and watch the speedy silver birds take to the air and land. Now, huge, powerful jet aircraft seem as ordinary as buses and we hardly pay attention to them anymore.

But Jeffrey Milstein still sees them with wonder and delight, and he photographs them in flight in such a way that they come alive again as the amazing, efficient machines they truly are. Standing with his camera at the end of a runway watching them descend, he freezes their headlong 200-mile-per-hour motion, capturing all the details of their shapes and construction with absolute precision. When he prints the photographs, he eliminates the background, even when it is clear blue sky, for his is an artist's eye, taking the familiar object and lifting it into art by causing us to see it in a brand-new way.

Now we can recapture the thrill of seeing these miraculous inventions as if for the first time, studying their remarkable engineering details, shiny aluminum cladding, and bright distinctive airline paint jobs in a way that would be impossible without his intervention.

Milstein's boyhood enthusiasm for flying—he took lessons in high school—has found a new expression in these marvelous images. Here are more than three dozen of his award-winning photographs, many of which have been shown as exquisite, large color prints in galleries and are being collected by connoisseurs of photography, as well as aviation buffs who recognize their unique quality.

About the photographer:

Jeffrey Milstein, a photographer, designer, and architect, grew up in Los Angeles and studied art and architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. His interest in aviation and photography began in high school; he took flying lessons at the age of seventeen and has maintained his private pilot's license since that time. After many years spent as an architect and graphic designer, he launched his own note card publishing company, called Paper House Productions, but sold the business in 2000 in order to concentrate on his photography. His work has been published in The New York Times, GRAPHS Design and Photography Annuals, PRINT Magazine, and American Photography 21. Milstein has had gallery exhibitions in New York City; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; and Woodstock, New York, and his photographs are included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon; George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz in New York; Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and Musée de L'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

His photographs of commercial airliners won first place in the PDN Digital Photography Contest in 2005. He maintains a state-of-the-art photography design studio and gallery in Kingston, New York.

About the writers:

Walter J. Boyne, the former director of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C., enlisted as a private in the United States Air Force in 1951 and retired in 1974 as a colonel with more than 5,000 hours in a score of different aircraft, from a Piper Cub to a B-52. In 1998, the National Aeronautic Association named him an Elder Statesman of Aviation for his achievements.

Boyne has written more than 400 articles on aviation subjects and is one of only a few authors to have had both fiction and nonfiction books on the New York Times bestseller lists.

Ariel Shanberg was appointed as Executive Director of The Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York, in 2003.

He also serves as co-editor of the Center's PHOTOGRAPHY

Quarterly and has curated many exhibitions at CPW.