(Plane Landing)

Spend a whole day at Frankfurt airport. Not in the terminal or the runway, but on a concrete platform on the other end of the many fences. And take pictures of planes. Sometimes things happen but most of the time you wait. For the next plane, for the 30 seconds where everything happens fast. Then wait again.

(Plane Landing) takes you through such a day at Frankfurt airport and sheds light on various perspectives of the hobby, plane-spotting. In a personal conversation with Holger and Karsten, two seasoned plane-spotters, we get to the bottom of this seemingly strange hobby. Where does it come from, this fascination with aircrafts? Why not trains? Doesn’t it get boring to stand at a sad fence the whole day? Or is it precisely this preoccupation with waiting?

Or does it, in the end, no longer have anything to do with the plane, but more to do with collecting? To have photographed, or at least seen, all the planes there are in the world, is often the self-explained goal. A goal everybody knows will never be reached. But that’s how you collect photos, aircraft models, sick bags, safety cards, seats, tornadoes and serving trolleys from Lufthansa.

Stefan Marx also describes his airplane collection in the third conversation of this publication. The Berlin-based illustrator has drawn countless pictures of planes on his journeys, which he told us in a conversation he regards, not as part of his job, but as a hobby.

(Plane Landing) is a book about collecting and is itself a collection. As a sticker album with 126 airplane stickers, the book shows both sides of plane-spotting: planes, and no planes. The accompanying photographs were created together with Nis Petersen and describe the moment of waiting and observing, the long hours on the concrete platform between A5 and airport fence.