I’ve been thinking about planes since one landed outside the building I was in Thursday, and since I was already thinking about this whole flickr/getty business, I toggled over to my flickr tab and searched for “hudson” and “plane”.

The first, and best result was on Mattsnod’s stream (it’s since been taken down); he posted Janis Krums’ picture from her ferry ride across the river:

Pretty great image, right? Here it is, full size:

I then went to MSNBC to check out the news, and it looks like they had already gotten Janis Krums on the phone:

Talk about right place, right time. It’s excellent news that this crash turned out so miraraculously. All the talk about the courageous pilot and crew made me think of the air disaster simulations Richard Mosse shoots. I wrote about them a while back, here. Let’s have a redux from my previous post.

Mosse,a recent graduate of the Yale MFA program, shoots both disastersimulations and actual crashes with a view camera.

Seems like Mosse has altered the work a little bit– now on his site, the project is called Airside. Curious.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Mosse from the great bldgblog.
 
“I spotted my first air disaster simulator on the tarmac at JFK,”Mosse wrote. “You can see it yourself next time you fly into thatairport. It’s an intimidating black oblong structure situateddangerously close to one of the runways. Ever since, I have hunted forair trainers while taxi-ing across each new airport that I’ve had thechance to fly into.”

When I asked him about the actual photographicprocess – setting himself up near burning, abstract airplanes in orderto get the right shot – Mosse replied: “They are extremely difficult tophotograph. First the water jets are turned on to douse the fuselage inwater. This is in order to stop the metal warping under the intenseheat of the flames. Then a pilot light comes on – and the spectaclebegins.”

“But before you’ve had a chance to cock your shutter and take the photo,” Mosse continued, it is all finished.

As for the actual plane crashes, these are also difficult tophotograph. You must be prepared to travel immediately in order tophotograph one, and you don’t know if you will even be able to get aphotograph of it when you get there. For very good reasons, pressphotographers are always corralled into a pen at a great distance fromthe disaster. Most photographers take out their longest lens and zoomright in – but I don’t have a zoom lens. I shoot with a wooden fieldcamera, and so I am forced to shoot the disaster in its context, as alandscape photograph. The results end up looking like somethingapproaching early war photography from the 19th century.”

707 San Bernadino, 2007

707 Damascus, 2008

Untitled (San Bernardino), air disaster simulator, California, USA, October 2007

Untitled (Grammatiko), Helios air disaster near Marathon, Greece, August 2005

Untitled (Heathrow), air disaster simulator, London, UK, August 2007

Untitled (Blackpool), air disaster simulator, Blackpool, UK, December 2007

Untitled (Schiphol), air disaster simulator, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2007

Untitled (San Bernardino), air disaster simulator, California, USA, June 2007

A320 Blackpool, 2008

See more of Mosse’s work here.