Aircraft: The Jet as Art

Book excerpt: Sometimes it takes an artist to show us that familiar things are truly remarkable. Jeffrey Milstein's elegant photographs of commercial airliners restore the rigor and glamour to our experience of air travel. They have quickly become contemporary icons, published in 2005 in photo magazine, Graphis PhotoAnnual, and American Photography Annual, and winning first place in the PDN Digital Photography Contest. For the past five years, Milstein has been taking meticulous large-format photographs of commercial airliners as they take off and land, revealing the beauty and power of these sleek but complex machines. An eloquent foreword by Walter J. Boyne helps the reader appreciate these amazing technological wonders, with their incredibly powerful engines that run for so many thousands of hours that they are more vulnerable to rust than to wear. The book gives technical data on each airplane pictured.