🍪 This Website uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn More

Inquire

AirCraft: The Jet as Art
Login
00H
00M
00S

Inquire

This work hasn’t been minted yet. Please leave your details if you’d like us to mint the work for you to purchase or if you have any other questions.

137 Reserve Club

The 137 Reserve Club is an invite-only group of collectors with first access to work from the world’s most iconic photographers. Sign Up to access the full inventory from this collection.

Make an offer

0

Jeffrey Milstein

AirCraft: The Jet as Art

‌

Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein. Blue Angel F_A-18 Hornet

When artist Jeffrey Milstein was a kid, airplanes were a novelty. A favorite pastime was hanging around the end of the runway at the Los Angeles International Airport. Wired

Creating photographic work can be a means of exploring a subject. For Jeffrey Milstein, his photographic typology AirCraft: The Jet as Art combines an innate curiosity about aircraft with a true aeronautical expertise as a pilot himself.

Typologies have existed throughout the history of photography, presenting variations on a common subject through a consistency in composition and subject placement within the frame. To produce such work requires a great deal of discipline, and in Milstein’s case, perfect timing as well. To produce these images, the photographer stood on runway R24 of Los Angeles International Airport and pointed his camera skyward. While the images may resemble model airplanes at first glance, they are indeed real planes in flight that Milstein captured as the took off and landed above his head. Milstein himself described his practice “like shooting a moving duck…The planes are moving so fast, and I have only a hundredth of a second to get my shot.”

The results of Milstein’s work is a project that reveals the underbellies of aircraft, and in doing so, presents the fascinating differences of airplane types and color schemes. No two are exactly alike, and they read as types of portraits, albeit with subjects that are moving through the air at nearly 200 miles-per-hour. The formal consistency of Milstein’s work comes from the human impulse to collect and observe.

From Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies to the world of sports photography, the camera allows for a way of seeing beyond the ability of the human eye. There is an elegance in freezing the speed of life. Most things move too fast to be dwelled upon by the observer, to be examined, or even dissected. The camera provides us new powers of comprehension, powers that Milstein adeptly utilizes in his work. The tremendous roars of planes flying overhead is a familiar sound, as well as the speed at which planes cross the sky. Yet the work of Aircraft: The Jet as Art distills these perceptions into stillness and silence, allowing viewers a space to pause and meditate on these wondrous machines.

Selected Works

00 / 00

Jeffrey Milstein

EVA Air Boeing 777-300ER

1 ETH

Bid Now

On Foundation

Jeffrey Milstein

Robinson 44

1 ETH

View

On Foundation

Jeffrey Milstein

Southwest Boeing 737-700 Penguin One

1 ETH

Bid Now

On Foundation

Jeffrey Milstein

Harrier Jump Jet

1 ETH

Bid Now

On Foundation

Jeffrey Milstein

Air Canada Airbus A319

1 ETH

Bid Now

On Foundation

Full Collection

The 137 Reserve Club is an invite-only group of collectors with first access to work from the world’s most iconic photographers. Sign Up to access the full inventory from this collection.

Artist

Jeffrey Milstein

1944 (USA)

Credit: Frank Spinelli

Jeffrey Milstein (b. 1944, New York) is a photographer based in Woodstock, New York.

He received a degree in architecture from UC Berkley in 1968, and practiced as an architect before turning to photography in 2000. Milstein earned his pilots license at 17, and his passion for flight led to his well known typology of aircraft photographed from below while landing. The work was presented in a solo show at the Ulrich Museum of Art in 2008, as well as in a year long solo show at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2012. In 2016 it was on display at the Brandts Museum in Odense, Denmark.

In recent years Milstein has reversed the direction of the camera creating award winning unique aerial images of man-made landscapes that are iconic and emblematic of the modern world. These photographs have been recently shown in solo shows at Kopeikin Gallery, Bau-Xi Gallery, and Benrubi Gallery in 2017-2018. The National History Museum of Los Angeles County opened a permanent installation in 2017 which included a large scale reproduction of Milstein’s aerial photograph of Beverly Hills. His aerial photograph of Newark Airport is a cover image for the catalog accompanying the traveling FEP exhibition “Civilization, The Way We Live Now”.

Milstein’s photographs have been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and Europe, and are represented by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, Benrubi Gallery in NYC, Bau-Xi Gallery in Canada, and ARTITLEDcontemporary in Europe. His photographs have been published in New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian, Esquire, Fortune, Time, Harper’s, GQ, European Photography, American Photo, Eyemazing, Graphis, photomagazin, Die Ziet, Liberation, Wired, PDN, Esquire, Conde Naste Traveler, and featured on the CBS evening news with Scott Pelly. Abrams published Milstein’s aircraft work as a monograph in 2007, Monacelli published his extensive body of work from Cuba as a monograph in 2010, and Thames and Hudson published LA NY, a collection of aerial photographs of LA and NY in 2017. His work has been collected by museums including LACMA, the Smithsonian Museum, the George Eastman House, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Akron Art Museum.

Press + Articles