And the veins of the leaf? A weapons storage facility for the US Navy – a complex of turf-covered, concrete bunkers linked together by now overgrown roads and railway tracks.
These images are the work of the American photographer Jeffrey Milstein – the product of his enduring passion for the view from above. At the age of fifteen, Milstein, who grew up in California, began taking flying lessons. On the day of his seventeenth birthday, he earned his pilot’s licence. He did not, however, pursue a career as a pilot. Instead, he chose to study architecture at Berkley, and later went on to start a graphic design company. You can see all of these influences coming together in his work.
Milstein takes his aerial photographs from the cockpit of light aircraft or small, agile helicopters, always flying at sunset, when the low light makes shadows longer and suffuses everything with a golden glow. Almost all of his images look straight down at the landscape – what’s known as ‘vertical’ aerial photography, a technique that requires the aircraft to bank steeply and fly round a target in tight circles, allowing the camera to point straight down. In a plane, this means opening the window and pointing the lens out. In a helicopter, it means removing the whole door prior to the flight… It’s not for the faint-hearted.
From this vantage point, Milstein brings his architect’s training, and his graphic designer’s eye, to bear on the world below. His preoccupation is with pattern and colour, transforming even the most banal sites – a car park, a freeway intersection, a housing estate – into works of abstract beauty. Often, Milstein stays in the air after the sun has dropped below the horizon, capturing cities – in particular Los Angeles and New York – as their electric lights flicker on to meet the dusk. In these images, even broader ideas and possibilities emerge. Photographs of New York’s Time Square and Broadway redraw the map of the city with pathways of bright, neon energy. It’s like you’re looking down on New York’s central nervous system, glowing with flashes of synaptic light.
