I hope you didn’t expect from my title to see a shot of a nudist airport. 🙂 The “au natural” refers to an unedited (except for copyright) photo shot at the Phoenix airport while waiting for our Southwest flight back to the land of winter. Even while tired and still sick, I was captivated by the shapes, shadows, and reflections in a black and white segment of a world that normally appears in color and had to grab the shot while I could.
“I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops – nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked – people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (…) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not”.”
~Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
And your feelings about airports and flying?
This, that and the other thing 