Between roughly 1958 and 1983, Garry Winogrand kept returning to the same stretch of public ground. The earliest frame in this body of work dates from about 1958; the last was made in 1983, only months before his death. Airports gave him what the street gave him — strangers in transit, waiting on long rows of attached seats, hauling luggage, greeting and leaving — and he photographed them with the same appetite he brought to everything else.

The book assembles 86 photographs, most of them previously unpublished, drawn from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which holds hundreds of contact sheets containing airport images and more than 1,100 prints of airplanes and airports. Alex Harris, who first published selections from the material in DoubleTake in 1996, and Lee Friedlander, a longtime colleague, edited the selection. The result is not a survey of an assignment but the construction of a coherent strand from dispersed, largely unsequenced negatives.

Much of the interest lies in what the pictures refuse to be. They are not nostalgic set pieces. Hairstyles and clothing date them, yet the spaces and sensations they record — the queue, the carousel, the gate, the goodbye — remain stubbornly current. Read alongside Winogrand’s street work, the airport pictures show him testing the same problems of crowd, frame and timing in a setting where movement is constant and everyone is briefly between two places.

Steidl published the book in 2004 as a hardcover of 112 pages, in a horizontal format that gives the wide terminal views room to breathe. For collectors following postwar American street photography, its value is documentary and editorial rather than speculative: it gathers in one volume a sustained body of work that otherwise survives only in the archive, and it demonstrates how two experienced editors gave shape to material the photographer left unedited.