LAX Through Hotel Room Windows

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  01.02.06 | 12:58 PM ET

imagePhotographer Zoe Crosher embarked on an unusual and oddly compelling project in 2001: She decided to photograph planes coming in to land at Los Angeles International Airport, shooting them through the windows of 31 motels and hotels around LAX. “Crosher shoots in the morning, and the images (which often feature the plastic linings of cheap curtains) are in a sense second to the narrative thread of the series: transience, anonymity and the fleeting promise of Los Angeles,” writes Steffie Nelson in last Thursday’s L.A. Weekly. A book collection of the photos, “Out the Window (LAX),” is due to be published this spring, with an introduction by Pico Iyer.

Among the highlights of the story:

Crosher’s parents met on an airplane in 1964. Her mother was a TWA stewardess and her diplomat father was returning to New York from Frankfurt. Their first date was at the New York World’s Fair, and the life they gave their two kids was filled with travel and faraway places. Crosher could have rebelled against her rootless upbringing, she says, but has in fact always loved the “liberation” of hotels.

Crosher has her own Web site for the project.

Iyer’s eloquent introduction is available on her site (due to site mechanics, a direct link isn’t possible). He writes:

Zoe Crosher’s work starts off at LAX, but it is taking us somewhere very different, to that global Airportland where the billboards are all for Korean companies, the words “hotel” and “taxi” are understood by nearly everybody, a stranger is walking towards you with a smile and an extended hand. You don’t know who he is, but he has ideas about you; and when the light comes up in the morning, you know you’re not in a place you recognize, but you don’t know exactly which of those places it is. It gives me heart that she is going off, ahead of us, to map this unknown country, fearless as one of the explorers of the 19th century, investigating India or the salt spaces of Utah, and ready to risk herself, even to lose herself, in the process. Like all art, her pictures teach us how to pay attention.

Photo: Zoe Crosher, “LAX Hampton Inn” 2002, lightjet print, #3/5 with 2A.P., 27"x27.” Courtesy of DCKT Contemporary.

Tags: Air Travel, Media Addict, North America, United States, California, Los Angeles, News and Briefs


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