Thomas Florschuetz: Jets

Thomas Florschuetz photographed fighter jets standing in ordered ranks in the Sonora Desert in Arizona. Jets, published by Hatje Cantz in May 2009, gathers fifty-three images from that series and appeared alongside exhibitions at Galleria Enrico Astuni in Bologna and Galerie Volker Diehl in Berlin.

Florschuetz works close in. He attends to textures, lines, colour planes, and the way light deflects off a surface or is absorbed by it; he enlarges what he has found and returns to the same aircraft from different angles. Texture, line and adjacent fields of colour carry the pictures, and the machine is the occasion for them. Handled this way, the jets take on an abstract quality through configurations of plane and edge that the photographer composes with something like a painter’s attention to interval and interval’s interruption.

What keeps the work from settling into pure formalism is wear. Scratches, patina and signs of wear read as evidence of time, and they press against the aircraft’s claim to technological supremacy. Photographed in rows, in desert light, the planes begin to resemble something excavated rather than something deployed — the publisher frames this in terms of palaeontological remains, and the photographs earn the comparison through their own insistence on surface.

Ninety-six pages, clothbound, with texts by Alessandra Pace and Ulf Erdmann Ziegler printed in German, English and Italian, the volume concentrates on this body of work. Florschuetz, born in Saxony in 1957, has long examined perception, architecture and layered visual structures; here, the surface of a military aircraft becomes material for a photographic inquiry. For a collection, the interest lies in the meeting of abstraction with historical wear: these machines carry both visual possibilities and the traces of transience. The book brings those concerns together in a focused study of objects associated with technological power.

The German photographer Thomas Florschuetz (b. 1957) uses his camera to explore the surfaces of fighter jets, drawn by their haptic and morphological qualities. Textures, lines, juxtaposed color fields, and light reflections are examined in their full visual richness, conveying the immediacy of seeing. By focusing on details, enlarging the scale, and approaching the objects from various angles, the jets take on an abstract quality that Florschütz composes as if he were creating a painting. The once deadly war machines, neatly lined up in Arizona's Sonora Desert, are thus transformed into paleontological finds whose signs of transience, such as scratches or patina, undermine the pursuit of military dominance.
Exhibitions: Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna 8.5.–31.7.2009 | Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin 25.9.–14.11.2009

Texts by: Alessandra Pace, Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
German, English, Italian
May 2009, 96 Pages , 53 Photos
clothbound
1mm x 1mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-2466-1

Publisher page editorial text:
Attracted by their haptic and morphologic quality, the German photographer Thomas Florschuetz (*1957 in Saxony) uses his camera to explore the surface of fighter jets. Textures, lines, juxtaposing color planes, light deflections, and absorptions are explored in all their visual richness and so convey the immediacy of vision. By concentrating on details, magnifying the scale, and reiterating the subjects from different angles, the jets take on an abstract quality, which Florschuetz arranges as if he were composing a painting. The once lethal war-machines lined up in orderly ranks in the Sonora Desert in Arizona are thus mutated into something more akin to paleontological remains whose signs of transience such as scratches and patina undermine the quest for technological supremacy.
 
Exhibition schedule: Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna, May 8–July 31, 2009 | Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, September 25–November 14, 2009

Publisher source ↗