Published by Hatje Cantz in 2015, Chien-Chi Chang’s Jet Lag turns global air travel away from destinations and toward the condition of perpetual transit. This 120-page hardcover is built from succinct black-and-white photographs: check-in counters, interchangeable hotel rooms, aircraft, beds and illuminated screens form the practical scenery of a life organized across time zones. The title names more than fatigue. It describes a state in which place, time and bodily perception no longer fully correspond.

Chang’s approach is restrained rather than spectacular. Repeated interiors and travel apparatus provide continuity, while distinctions between cities recede. Human contact is reduced to anonymous proximity—the warmth of another passenger, or sounds passing through a hotel wall. These details make disconnection tangible without turning it into melodrama. The photographs attend to pauses, waiting and enclosure: the intervals that conventional travel imagery usually treats as incidental.

The project belongs within Chang’s sustained examination of alienation, a concern he has also pursued through mental states, marriage and nationality. A member of Magnum Photos since 2001, he uses the conventions of documentary photography while allowing uncertainty to remain central. In Jet Lag, the infrastructure that promises international connection instead produces standardization: rooms, vehicles and screens recur until geographical difference becomes difficult to hold onto. The book consequently reads as both a personal-scale study of disorientation and an observation of globalized mobility in the early twenty-first century.

For a collection concerned with contemporary documentary practice, travel photography or the photobook’s treatment of modern infrastructure, Jet Lag offers a particularly concentrated statement. Its significance does not depend on grand events or exotic locations, but on Chang’s ability to identify an overlooked psychological space and give it a precise visual language. The volume also places a recurring theme in his work into a self-contained monograph, making it valuable for understanding how estrangement can be constructed through repetition, compression and the disciplined use of black and white.