ATL gathers Mark Steinmetz’s photographs made in and around Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport between 2012 and 2019. The project was undertaken for the High Museum of Art’s Picturing the South series. Instead of treating the airport only as a machine for moving people, Steinmetz attends to the lives temporarily brought together there: passengers, airport workers and people waiting between one activity and another. The black-and-white photographs make room for gestures and pauses within a place usually defined by schedules.

An airport brings strangers into close proximity while sending them towards different destinations. Steinmetz’s pictures allow that shared space to retain its uncertainties. A person at rest may be surrounded by movement; a small gesture can draw attention away from the scale of the building. The sequence also extends beyond the terminal to the surrounding land and to views from aircraft windows. These shifts open the project to different distances, connecting human encounters with the larger spaces through which travel takes place.

Published by Nazraeli Press in 2024, this 80-page clothbound hardcover measures 10.5 by 12 inches. Gregory J. Harris contributes the introduction. The book gives photographs made over several years a single, bounded sequence, allowing the reader to compare different kinds of waiting, work and passage. Moving between portraits, surroundings and aerial views changes the pace of looking without leaving the project’s central setting behind.

For readers interested in Steinmetz’s attention to everyday life, ATL offers a focused setting in which to follow that approach. The airport is both highly organised and full of moments that escape organisation. As a photobook, the project makes that tension available through the relationship between images rather than through an account of one journey. Its interest for a collection lies in the sustained study of a familiar public space and the variety of encounters it can hold.