“The idea of being in a plane is so much about being between places and that’s part of that state of mind I wanted to try and photograph.”
I first saw photographer John Schabel’s images back in 1997 when he brought a very large box of incredibly beautiful prints for Twin Palms publisher Jack Woody to view. Now more than 15 years later, Twin Palms is publishing Schabel’s monograph “Passengers,” a fascinating series depicting eerily anonymous airline passengers isolated behind sealed airplane windows. I spoke to Schabel to congratulate him on his long awaited book of these extraordinary images before his upcoming book signing at New York’s International Center for Photography:
Elizabeth Avedon: I have the feeling you wouldn’t want to give the literal details of where you took these photographs. I’m not even sure I want to know.
John Schabel: The thing about them is they are so ‘no place’. The idea of being in a plane is so much about being between places and that’s part of that state of mind I wanted to try and photograph. It’s so much about the in-between time and a mixture of feelings and emotions; I thought maybe I could make portraits of people in that state of mind you get into when you fly.
EA: Are your “Clouds” part of the same Passenger series?
JS: Clouds was an earlier separate series that is ongoing. I made a decision to pursue photography around 1990 and it started with my Cloud images. I had this idea of a symbol of a cloud or a cloud the way you might draw the shape of it in the sky as a child. I wanted to try and photograph one like that. It would be a kind of idealized cloud, a real cloud with all the incredible detail and complexity that a cloud has. I imagined it being on a black sky and so I went about trying to do that. I discovered certain things; that if I went to a higher altitude, the sky would be bluer and then using a red filter I could really make the sky very black.
EA: How did you shoot them from a higher altitude?
JS: I grew up in the West in Montana so I would go up to higher altitudes with a car into the mountains; you can go to 14,000 feet in some places, but some were shot from planes in the West.
Elizabeth Avedon
Passengers John Schabel
Twin Palms Publishers
First Edition, Casebound
8 x 10 Inches, 73 Duotone Plates, 84 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-931885-97-3
ICP Book Signing: John Schabel’s Passengers
ICP Store
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York
USA
Friday, February 8, 6:00pm–7:30pm
