Blog About Photography

My good friend Ben over at Planet of the Books just sent me a heads up about the inter­view he just posted with pho­tog­ra­pher Brian Finke. I first saw Finke’s work on the Goings on About Town sec­tion of the New Yorker, a page near the front that fea­tures one of the magazine’s only pho­tographs every week. It was a pic­ture of a cou­ple of acro­bats stretch­ing and I was so capit­vated by it that I emailed Brian to say hey. Hey never wrote me back, but I’m sure that was just some kinda over­sight or he hadn’t heard of me yet or some­thing, you know? Any­way, dude recently showed his Flight Atten­dants at Clam­pArt and Pow­er­House Books just put out a mono­graph of the work.

BEN: The first ques­tion that will no doubt come to everyone’s mind as they look through this beau­ti­ful book, Flight Atten­dants, is “How is this pos­si­ble?” Gain­ing access is always a chal­lenge for doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phers, how did you gain access here? Was your pre­vi­ous work and rep­u­ta­tion an aid or do you believe you could have gained access with­out that history?

BF: Flight Atten­dants is a per­sonal project I started in 2004. I began propos­ing air­line related story ideas to mag­a­zines. I worked with them to help gain access and get my first intro­duc­tions to air­lines. For the pro­pos­als I had to come up with an edi­to­r­ial per­spec­tive. An early pro­posal was to pho­to­graph air­lines that had hired high end design­ers to design their uni­forms. I pho­tographed a port­fo­lio about Flight Atten­dant fash­ion for City Mag­a­zine and another port­fo­lio the fol­low­ing year for their travel issue. I also did sto­ries for the New York Times Mag­a­zine, For­tune, Newsweek and Cathay Pacific’s in-​​flight mag­a­zine pho­tograph­ing flight atten­dants work­ing dur­ing flights, at home and at train­ing schools.

The mag­a­zines and I con­tacted air­lines pub­lic rela­tions depart­ments. The air­line would either want noth­ing to do with the sto­ries or would totally be into the press. Once the air­lines were on board I would have amaz­ing access, run­ning around air­ports with my assis­tant, dur­ing flights and out on tar­macs. And fly­ing all around the world.

Read the rest of the inter­view at Planet of the Books

Posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 5:34 pm