My book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight is now out in paperback, beautifully rebranded under the Bloomsbury imprint, and there have been some nice reviews to coincide with the release of the new affordable edition. In a few cases, readers have sent me photos of the book being read at… Read More »
Day 5 of our photo blog 'Claiming baggage is also a psychological diagnosis of sorts; it is something we say when we seek to displace accountability: “He has a lot of baggage.” This trope was famously literalized in the opening credit scenes of Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate. In many ways, the entire fi m… Read More »
Day 4 of our photo blog 'If screening hinges on pleasure, this in no way means that screening practices are superfluous. Indeed, even at their most pleasurable and seemingly distracting, screens are functional apparatus, administering and facilitating the everyday operations of airports. For instance, Gillian Fuller helpfully outlines the screening function of airport windows in her… Read More »
Day 3 of our photo blog Alain de Botton describing the baggage claim in A Week at the Airport: “. . . in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred to formulate hopeful plans for the future… Read More »
Day 2 of our photo blog The next instalment in our Airports photo week takes us into the advertising world… “Pick a nice spot for your library” (© 2006 Sony Electronics Inc.) ‘In 2006 Sony ran an ad for the Reader (an early e-reading device, to be followed by the more successful Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad,… Read More »
Day 1 of our photo blog Last week our author Christopher Schaberg's guest post included a lovely photo of Brad Pitt. I immediately thought to myself, 'this man has good taste in photos'. Another quick look through Christopher's book affirmed this to me. And so was born the Airports photo week! Each day this week I… Read More »