Brian Finke’s Flight Attendants follows the people whose working lives unfold between airports, aircraft cabins and temporary stops far from home. Made during two years of travel across the United States, Europe and Asia, the photographs move beyond the familiar passenger’s view of a uniform and a practiced greeting. They attend to the individuals carrying out the work, and to the routines that continue before boarding and after arrival.

Finke photographed crews from a range of airlines and visited a flight-attendant training school in London. Training exercises, journeys and domestic settings bring different aspects of the occupation into the same project. The polished appearance expected in public sits alongside less formal moments, allowing professional presentation and personal experience to remain visible together. His attention to ordinary gestures gives the subject a scale closer to daily life than to an advertisement for travel.

Uniforms and shared tasks connect this work to Finke’s earlier photographs of American cheerleaders and football players. In each setting, membership of a group is expressed through clothing, movement and repeated actions, while individual personalities persist within those conventions. Flight Attendants extends that interest into an international workplace. The photographs invite attention to the relationship between a recognizable collective identity and the particular people who sustain it.

Published by powerHouse Books in 2008, this hardcover contains 51 color photographs across 112 pages in a square format. Texts by Alix Browne and Alison Nordström accompany Finke’s photographs. For a photobook collection, its interest lies in this focused study of work, appearance and social belonging: a familiar occupation becomes a subject through which to consider how people inhabit a public role while maintaining lives beyond it.