Landing Lights Portrait (Raleigh-Durham Intl to LaGuardia), 2018 © David Rothenberg

David Rothenberg is a photographer based in Queens, New York. He earned an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. In 2017, Rothenberg’s work was included in the exhibition On Freedom at the Aperture Foundation Gallery in New York. Rothenberg is the recipient of a 2018 Queens Art Fund New Works Grant for his project Landing Lights Park. In Fall 2018, ROMAN NVMERALS published the project as a limited edition photography book. TIME Magazine named Landing Lights Park one of the “Best Photobooks of 2018.” Rothenberg’s work has been published and written about in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Die Zeit and featured on The New Yorker’s Instagram account.

In his latest work, Landing Lights Park, Rothenberg captures East Elmhurst, the neighborhood that lies beneath New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Wires and Ivy (Delta), 2018 © David Rothenberg

LANDING LIGHTS PARK

The camera’s ability to freeze motion to reveal hidden forms, one of the earliest properties of fascination for the medium, still holds true for me in illuminating an essentially universal experience in an unexpected way. Landing Lights Park looks at the Queens neighborhood that lies beneath the whining roar and shadows of jetliners landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Aircraft descend over Landing Lights Park, a stretch of undeveloped land within the working class neighborhood of East Elmhurst, at intervals as frequent as every 90 seconds and as low as 150 feet above the ground, leaving behind a noxious backdrop of noise and polluted air for residents. My photographs explore this extraordinary intrusion within a landscape of the ordinary.

Reflection (Comfort Inn), 2018 © David Rothenberg

Landing Lights Portrait (Emergency Exit), 2018 © David Rothenberg

The project offers a sequence of disorienting photographic collisions. I use the camera to bring stillness to the cacophonous landscape and find meaning in the visual slippages that I encounter: the faces of passengers gazing out their windows as they pass overhead, lumbering planes seemingly stuck in trees or tangled up in wires, and aircraft passing uncomfortably close to residential spaces. Within these suspended moments of descending jetliners there exists the potential for disaster — a deliberate meditation on this precarious moment in American history in which a sense of doom and uncertainty is palpable.