A few nights ago, I was sitting on my porch in Marfa and a light caught my attention. It wasn’t a star or a famed Marfa Mystery Light, it was a perfectly explicable airplane, blinking its way across the vast dark. In most other places, an overhead airplane might be a normal occurrence, but out here, it’s not. The sky is usually very quiet at night, filled with nothing but stars.
Living in Marfa, the closest commercial airports are 3 hours away in either direction– in El Paso and Midland. Leaving town involves a lot of momentum, mentally and physically catapulting yourself out of the desert for a day of travel that means at least one car, and likely more than one plane, and floating through airports in a mess of stress and sweat (this sensation is not unique to a small town– I’d venture to say that people generally agree airports are annoying).
In contrast to the commercial airport experience, there’s a deep calm to the small municipal airports scattered throughout Texas. These places are visually and sonically quieter– slight aberrations on flat, open land, with boxy hangars like monoliths dropped from above. Behemoth commercial airports, the kind most of us are used to, tend to be so generic that it's easy to forget which city you're in.
“Smaller airports have so much character,” says Marfa artist and writer Kathleen Shafer. “It really allows you to slow down and experience the landscape. It just makes everything more human, I think.”
Kathleen has spent several years photographing that specific but ordinary beauty, capturing the 400 plus general use airports of Texas, with a particular focus on small airports in rural areas, frequented mostly by hobbyists, farmers, and local aviation enthusiasts.
In the 5 years she’s been photographing Texas airports, she’s made her way around the entire state the long way, winding through counties down blue highways– secondary roads that might be just two lanes wide– to find her way to various small town airfields, sometimes a dozen or more in a day. She's driven over 20,000 miles for the project, and her aviation road trips have provided her with an opportunity to see and capture all kinds of topography from the deserts of Far West Texas to the flats of the Panhandle, to the forests (forests!) of East Texas. All of these places have small airports nestled into the landscape.
Kathleen's mom was a flight attendant for thirty years. “I kind of grew up in the industry,” she told me. She remembers her mom flying from DC to California during the day, then working the red eye flight back so that when Kathleen and her siblings woke up the next morning, their mom was home. “My mom absolutely loved her job,” Kathleen said. “I don't know, it seems weird now, but it's like, yeah, some people just like what they do.”
That love of air travel was passed down to Kathleen. Due to her mom’s career, Kathleen had access to unlimited travel until she was 25– she took advantage. And as a frequent flyer, she began to think more about the airports she found herself in.
“ I studied photography, I always had my camera with me, and I would look at what I was photographing, and I wasn't photographing the streets of Paris. I was photographing the airport in Paris, and so I was like, 'okay, I should just pay attention to this.'”
Kathleen photographed airports around the country for her MFA. This started to expand to old military bases and airfields, including one in Marfa.
“ Texas was home to a great deal of airfields because we have ideal flying weather. So a lot of pilots trained in Texas,” she says. While it's rare to see a plane in Marfa these days, at one point it was common. The first airport in Marfa opened in 1919, where the golf course is now. There were five different auxiliary fields, too, where pilots would practice flying.
“The current Marfa airport was one of those aux fields,” says Kathleen. “That is very normal, in the country, for an aux field to become a town's airport.”
After World War II, the vestiges of Marfa’s aviation history were spread across the region: “Capri and the Arena at Chinati, those were hangars from the golf course airport,” Kathleen says.
While all of the airports Kathleen photographs are made up of a handful of known elements– runways, control towers, hangars, and flight lines– she says that sameness is exciting.
”I'm totally fine being like, ‘I am photographing this runway from the exact same position that I photographed the last 100 runways.’ That is beautiful to me. There is a sameness, but within that sameness, it's easier to identify the differences.”
Kathleen says the project is important to her because these spaces aren’t just changing, they’re disappearing. But these aren't sudden departures: “by the time the airport closes, it's been so badly maintained and basically ignored that it's kind of already become this semi-crumbling thing. It's just this slow progression of decay and history.”
The culture of aviation has also changed. What was once thought of as a more casual weekend endeavor has become less accessible. As the practice of flying diminishes, the role of these airports does too.
Kathleen says her work is “a documentary effort to preserve what was there, in some way.”
All photos courtesy of Kathleen Shafer. You can find more of her airport photos on her website.
High Five
This week's High Five is really only four tracks, from one album, but we promise it's the perfect accompaniment to Kathleen's photographs.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports - Brian Eno
Caló
Patón - It derives from the Spanish word for an animal’s foot. In Spanish, some anatomical parts have one name if it’s attached to a human being and a different name if it’s attached to an animal. It’s considered a pejorative if the term reserved for animals is applied to a human. The word for mouth, for example, is boca for humans and hocico for animals. The word for foot, is pie if on a human, and pata if on an animal. If somebody annoying cuz they’re saying things you don’t like, you might say ‘shut your hocico, ese’. The standard rule for the use of aggrandizing suffixes, like -ón, apply for these terms, as in bocón, hocicón, and patón. But in Caló, the former two mean loudmouth—and disrespectfully, and the latter means big person—and slightly complimentary, not someone with big feet. A big woman or man is a patona or patón, as if the feet are the measure of an individual.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodes here.
From the Newsroom
Visitors to Big Bend National Park in West Texas will have an extra two months to access the popular Chisos Basin area this year before a lengthy project begins in July to tear down and rebuild the park’s Chisos Mountain Lodge.
The project was originally scheduled to begin in May, but park officials announced this month construction has been pushed back to July.
Once construction begins, the Chisos Basin will be completely closed to visitors. As parts of the project are completed, officials will “assess which areas can be safely reopened to regular public access,” the park said in a press release.
Travis Bubenik spoke to BBNP spokesperson Tom VandenBerg for more details on the updates Chisos closure timeline. You can read the rest of that story here.
PSAs
Marfa Live Arts presents the Ninth Annual Winter Theater Showcase at Planet Marfa on Thursday, February 27th starting at 5pm.
The showcase features short monologues written by Marfa seventh and eighth grade award-winning students which will be brought to life with performances by local actors.
For more information, click here.
