At the Edge of Flight

The Mojave facility is not open to the public, and it does not extend casual invitations. So before we made a single image, we spent months in research. First, we identified the right contacts and worked out the legal framework for commercial photography on a restricted site. Then we worked through the agreements that the then-owner, Mike Potter, required.

Potter, who has since passed away, was an extraordinary figure. He knew every aircraft on the field intimately and had personally piloted some of them to their final resting place. Once we had settled the paperwork, he guided us across the airfield himself, his Labrador alongside him. He told stories that no archive could hold. His hospitality was as unexpected as it was generous. We have worked in restricted industrial environments before, but rarely with that kind of openness.

The Mojave Desert is not a comfortable working environment. The heat was relentless, and we shared the ground between the aircraft with rattlesnakes. That detail sharpens your attention in a way a studio cannot easily replicate. Moving across the field also required constant care. The conditions underfoot demanded it, and so did the scale and fragility of the machines themselves.

Once, a desert windstorm rolled in without much warning. Within minutes, the dust and the light changed. One of the images from that day carries the storm visibly: the atmosphere is different, and the quality of the air has shifted. We did not plan it. We worked with it.

The agreement with the facility restricted what we could photograph. Some areas and identifying details were off-limits. We respected that without reservation: access of this kind is rare, and the relationship behind it is worth protecting.

But some decisions were entirely our own. Not everything that was visually striking served the project. We made certain images and then set them aside. No contract required this. They simply pulled the work in a direction we did not want to go. DECOMMISSIONED is not documentation in the journalistic sense. Instead, it is a constructed view of a particular condition. That required choices.

The 24 motifs of the final series are what remained after that edit. In these images, the aircraft become something more than themselves. The industrial and the elegiac coexist, and neither cancels the other out.

We photographed these aircraft as a metaphor for a system’s dependence on oil and global mobility. It was a way to make an abstract vulnerability visible. In the decades before this project, international air traffic had grown exponentially. At the same time, the concept of Peak Oil cast a long shadow. Stripped of their instruments and engines and turned into spare-part stores, these machines made that shadow physical.

Sixteen years later, the project reads differently. What felt speculative in 2010 now reads as an early observation. Since then, questions around sustainability, industrial cycles and the limits of the global economy have become unmistakable. They have only grown sharper.

What stays with us from Mojave is the silence between the aircraft. So does the scale of machines that once crossed continents and now stand entirely still. Above all, we keep the realisation that every industrial cycle reaches its end. The only question, then as now, is what we choose to see in that moment. And whether we choose to look at all.

We have shown DECOMMISSIONED in international contemporary art contexts:

VFG BILDERSOIRÉE
Photobastei, Zurich, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, March 21, 2023

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
widmertheodoridis, Eschlikon, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, May 13–July 1, 2017

ICONIC GEOGRAPHY, WORKS 2005–2015
Anteprima D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy
Solo Exhibition, Feb 25–May 5, 2015

DECOMMISSIONED
Widmer+Theodoridis contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland
Solo Exhibition, Oct 29–Dec 24, 2010