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Airport tower7/9/2023 ![]() ![]() When you see it, it looks like something gliding across the desert. In the United Arab Emirates, the Dubai tower there and the Abu Dhabi tower-it’s in the shape of a crescent and to me it looks like a flowing robe. Is there an architectural period or a part of the world where you’ve found the towers particularly beautiful or innovative? However, just because something is on a historic record doesn’t naturally mean it will be preserved. Yes, a lot of historic ones are turned into office spaces, and that’s always nice to see. The Kansas Aviation museum is a former terminal and tower and the Newark administrative building used to be a tower. How are inactive airport towers being used? And there was this one couple that said they had had their first date at the tower. It was bittersweet because a lot of people from the community-they were used to this tower, this tower was a meeting place for years during the annual air show that they held at Oshkosh. When I finally went out there, it wasn’t a one-day process, so I was there for a couple of days. You were there for the demolition of the Wittman tower in Oshkosh, Wisconsin? However, I did get official access and I was able to get shots from right underneath the tower and up close. ![]() ![]() He actually put my paperwork in front of the right people and got me official access.īut the funny part of that story is, before going there, I have a friend who travels in Thailand and he said, “Hey stay at this hotel, you have really good access-you have a good view of the tower from the hotel.” Of course I stayed at the hotel.įunny, I jumped through all these hoops to get access and my hotel had a complete view of the tower. Long story short, I reconnected with him through Facebook because he works for a Thai airline or something like that. But when I was a kid, I had a Thai pen pal. I wrote and wrote for permission and no one was answering any of my emails and so I was not getting access. And a four-hour flight away from Thailand doesn’t seem that far away. So I thought, “Oh God, I should really try to do the Bangkok tower,” because at the time it was the tallest tower in the world. The Bangkok tower in Thailand: I was going to be in China for a photography festival. Russo's photography makes these ordinary structures extraordinary: more than mere aviation artifacts, they are monumental abstractions, symbols of cultural expression, and testimonies of technological change. I had a wish list of those I knew I wanted to include: one was the Dubai tower also, the one in Sydney, Australia. I looked out my plane window at the now-inactive LaGuardia tower, the huge circular, creamy quality of the tower and that’s where the idea sparked. He did this series of buildings that were out of focus, skyscrapers out of focus, everything as a distortion and refraction. I had been looking at a lot of the work of artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. She spoke with about her quest to photograph the towers and the exhibition on view at the National Air and Space Museum. With that sentiment in mind, these visible icons of a vast air traffic control system that governs the flights of some 50,000 daily aircraft globally, Russo’s photographs pay homage to their prosaic protective function while highlighting their strange and alluring beauty. In the presence of the tower, I sensed the complex orchestration of humans. I viewed each tower as both an essential aviation artifact and a vessel with a powerful presence-watching over the vastness of the airport and sky a non-judgmental cultural greeter a choreographer or conductor a mother bird caring for her flock an omniscient, intelligent structure keeping humans safe. In the preface to her new book, The Art of the Airport Tower(Smithsonian Books, 2015), which features more than 100 of her images, Russo writes: Negotiating her way through myriad bureaucratic processes to gain access to restricted areas, she took pictures of hundreds of these towering structures, some built by such renowned architects as Eero Saarinen, César Pelli and Gert Wingårdh. Over a span of eight years, often traveling alone and carrying all of her gear, including her 33mm digital camera, she visited 23 countries. Smithsonian photographer Carolyn Russo first found herself drawn to air traffic control towers in 2006 on a flight into LaGuardia when she first studied the architectural details and circular windows of that now inactive structure. ![]()
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