“… at an airport the individual is defined, not by the tangible ground mortgaged into his soul for the next 40 years, but the indeterminate flicker of flight numbers trembling on an annunciator screen. We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.”
J.G. Ballard 1930 – 2009
Airports hold a particular fascination, dystopian near-miss 1950s futures forked somewhere back in 1967. Like miniature Metropolises, with shops and gyms and showers and bars, utilities, police forces and mail services, museums, hotels and meeting rooms, magic moving walkways with phasing soundtracks all of their own. Towering brave architecture, archingly high ceilings hinting at wind blown Tallships setting sail out towards exotic lands and the sinking horizon. Or slabs of post-military-undustrial concrete, smoothed to the curves needed to accommodates the passing hordes of a yet unwritten Romero movie.
So what of these mini cities?
Dopplr sends me emails, citing when my friends are traveling around the world. At any one time, give or take a few days, there’s generally someone I know passing through an airport. Millions of other people are flowing through these citadels to modern travel each day.
Crunching down time, overlapping those days, collapsing each airport to its own naked singularity, we all have the same general experiences, move in unison on the same magic walkways, each taking our own 2.5 hours to pass through the system.
When I see that someone is flying to Chicago, I can instantly hear the distinctive clack clack clack sound of suitcase wheels on the O’Hare tiles. London Heathrow, Terminal 4, the long distant but still present dull bitter tang of worn Silk Cut imbued carpets. SFO, the monorail symmetry and looping arrival/departure roads.
Back to Flickr.
Flickr (to me) is about more than just photos (and videos) it’s about sharing experiences. People take photos to record their story of passing though a location or event. Flickr collects and collates those stories. That’s kinda where the Places idea grew from.
Places pages are for Cities, and Towns and Villages … and now even neighborhoods, for people treading the same footsteps but at different times. For many of us, the Airport is also a Place …
… and yet, a while back if you geotagged a photo taken at Heathrow Airport (for example) Flickr would say it was taken in the London Borough of Hounslow. When you arrive, depart or pass through Heathrow Airport, you don’t really think “My, that London Borough of Hounslow is a terribly busy place” while at the same time Hounslow probably doesn’t think of itself as having 1/4 million people passing through it each day … even though this is true.
Which is why, at some point, it changed, to this…
http://www.flickr.com/places/LHR
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/LAX
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/FRA
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/CDG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/AMS
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/HKG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/ORD
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/SFOWell, you get the idea …
Collecting together our transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy airport experiences.
Photos from Daniel H. Agostini aka dhammza, Telstar Logistics, heather and straup.
Filed under: eyesontheworld, flickr, geotags
Love this. I think I spend a good bit of my life in airports.
From one of my favorite authors (he devotes an entire chapter to airports): “The defining paradox of airports is that it offers all these amenities to people who really don’t want to be there, and tries to divert people whose only attention is on when they can get out” – Pico Iyer, The Global Soul