The is the “Ur”-Flyover State. I think walking home from the R train on 4th Avenue I started to follow the jet and wondered how it would coincide with the aerial atop the car service nearby- it looked like it would fit right on top but the geometry worked out like this;


There was something about this picture that stuck with me, the fluffy innocuous cloud, the grain, the needle form, and silhouette of the jet. A game began for me at that point, perhaps it would be possible to intentionally stick that jet on the pin as if it was meant to be there. This is how photography takes something and makes an impossible fact possible.

Of course you could do this in photoshop in a quick second, but that was not the point, it was about creating this intersection and then seeing what it looked like. Not all of them were equal. Why some are better or worse is really what photography is all about, sometimes it is a picture and sometimes it is not. Sometimes I get the jet on the pin and most times I did not. It’s really harder than it looks.

After a while I gave up on that and started working with jet trails, intersections, shapes, etc. Extending the vocabulary of the idea. It was never about getting a big picture of an aircraft like you see those ones at the beach in St. Maarten, the behemoth form inches from the ground, for me it was better the smaller it got, the more it dissolved into grain, the more it just became a field of tone.

The car service is gone now, the aerial moved to the south side of 4th Ave at 9th street, and is crooked. For all sorts of reasons it doesn’t work any more now for me, so effectively the series is over. It is an arbitrary way of finishing.

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