“At the age of ten I moved from the Swedish countryside to Paris with my parents, and the first thing I saw was the Charles de Gaulle airport. As a teenager, I traveled a lot between Paris and Sweden and therefore spent a lot of time at CDG. I was fascinated already then. The whole environment, the ambiance. It’s really a fascinating airport. Like a fantasy landscape. . . . CDG is connected to a big part of my past, and also came to signify big changes in my life as a kid. But what made this project interesting as well as how the world, and maybe especially airports, changed after 9/11. They are no longer what they used to be. Before, they tended to represent freedom, possibilities, openness. Now they have come to be a place where fear is very strong.”—JH Engström This photograph, part of Swedish photographer JH Engström’s series and book CDG/JHE (Steidl/GUN, 2007), which focuses on the Charles de Gaulle airport (flight code CDG), was photographed in color and printed using a special process that renders the print with an overall cast of gray, creating haunting monochromes.For this project, Engström spent three weeks isolated in an airport hotel, photographing the spaces and terminals of Charles de Gaulle. His images capture luggage carts, plastic chairs (as in this photograph), parking garages, and weary travelers. The series departs from the celebration of subjectivity that has defined much of Engström’s work so far and provides an almost abstract definition of the existential homelessness and displacement that is at the heart of Engström's work.
