AIRPORTS

The photo book “AIRPORTS” is dedicated to places that most travellers pay little attention to on the way to their destination: airports which are shown in a top view that gives them a very autonomous, graphic and almost illustrative quality. Between terminal facilities and runway markings, the planes on the concrete taxiways become a miniature version of themselves and part of a scene that, seen from a distance, reveals a clear order. The book is an aerial photography project by photographer Tom Hegen, who photographed Germany’s largest airports and their quiet runways during the COVID-19 lockdown between March and May 2020 to find an answer to the question: What happens to the airports during a state of emergency? At this historic moment, he undertook helicopter flights, some of them quite daring, and took unique aerial photographs of the disused taxiways. The results are rigorously structured, magical compositions that capture these places – the catalysts of our highly mobile society and links between continents, countries, cities and people – in geometric clarity and soothing tranquillity.