on the plane magazine

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About on the plane magazine

This group is open to photographers (the casual, the amateur, the professional, the artist) writers, industry professionals and aviation enthusiasts. While selective, we accept all image forms: from mobile devices, digital and film cameras. You will be contacted if your work has been selected for an upcoming issue (nothing will be published without your permission).

On The Plane is a collaborative project led by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope and Eanna Freeney of The Velvet Cell. Our interests converged on the extra/ordinary aspects of the On The Plane experience - not simply being on the plane, but an experiential vector built into the everyday.

The extra/ordinary is sourced to the fundamental ‘unnatural’ aspect of being transported 30,000 feet in the air. In this experecne we are exposed to a set of powerful binaries: the excitement of starting a new journey and the fear of what is unknown, the joy of coming home and the dread of retuning to an unwanted past, the hope of a new future in a distant land and the emptiness of leaving loved ones behind. It is a space full of connection, but also filled with loneliness and isolation, a place of safety and a place of fear, of tranquility and chaos, of incredible speed and complete sedentariness.

On The Plane is also a play on words. In western philosophy people use ‘On’ to signify a focused study on a matter, for example: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘On Certainty’, Émile Durkheim’s ‘On Suicide’, Karl Marx’s ‘On Historical Materialism’, John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘On Revolution’. All of these texts are manifestos on the human condition, spoken through a particular experience or object. This double meaning was too much to pass up. Here we wanted to use the On The Plane experience to delve both into life on and around the plane, and our lives ‘on the plane’ as an insight into the human condition in general.

Today air travel is felt by many to have become a nasty means to an end. There was always a certain romanticism attached to the train, the steamship and the motorcar. Here we are trying to make planes romantic too — in a hypermodern way. Even in the cramped conditions of modern flying we see flashes of pure beauty: Mt Fuji in fading light, Chicago glimmering in the early evening, New York on a stark cold day. These moments transport us out of the plane to a shared experiential connection with the fundamental forces of life.

What connects the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extra-ordinary’ is a powerful trust in the essentially human capacity to transport us beyond the mundane. The plane becomes a temple of humanism, where we put faith in all that get us and keeps us up in the air – engineers, pilots, researchers, air traffic controllers – a web of people, underwritten by collective knowledge, keeping us alive, together. So as much as we want to add to a romanticism to air travel, we want to reveal an underlying romanticism in the power of collective human activity – it is the synergy between the two that drives this project as philosophy expressed through photography.