In the Place of Public: Airport Series
1983–ongoing

Color photographs and text

Rosler began photographing airports intuitively, intrigued by the uses of space and the marked separation of the airport from the city it serves in these liminal moments between destinations. Designed to represent the modern anywhere, airports host interesting forms of exchange, labor, being, behavior, and control—all of which Rosler interrogates in her photographs and writings on these circuits of travel. The photographs depict passageways and portals in innumerable air terminals, lounges, and baggage areas; this interplay of movement and stasis gets at the central theme of the series—the construction of postmodern space. Advertisements for goods and services feature prominently in the works, underlining the all-too-obvious fact that capital needs determine these routes. In gallery installations, the photographs are interspersed with short wall texts that refer primarily to the phenomenological experience of air travel ("total control," "elsewhere and otherwise," "There are only no fragments where there is no whole"). Along the lower margin, strings of nouns refer to earlier modes of spatial and social organization ("a passage, a passageway, a journey; a boundary, a crossing, a milestone; a landmark, an outpost"). After the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which hijacked planes played the role of weaponry, Rosler added phrases to reflect the intensification of surveillance and fear in the system.