From the ground up

AT first glance, Jeffrey Milstein’s photographs of planes look like pictures of model aircraft. How else could he have captured the underbelly of a Boeing 757 or Airbus A340, centered on a white background like an insect in a museum collection?

Yet the planes are real, captured just before landing on runway 24 Right at Los Angeles International Airport. At a nearby spot just off LAX, Milstein trains his Contax 645 (with a 22-megapixel Phase One digital camera back) and pans along as the planes fly a few hundred feet overhead.

The aircraft are traveling about 200 mph -- yet the images are so sharp that the silver underbellies of some planes reflect the ground below.

“I have always been fascinated by aviation,” says Milstein, who swept out hangars at Santa Monica Airport as a boy and got his pilot’s license at 17. “I used to stand at the end of the runway and watch the planes land, and I wanted to capture the thrill of that kind of moment.”

So about five years ago, after a career as an architect and designer, Milstein set out on his “Aircraft” project, which has alighted at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery until early January. The display shows half of his series’ 20 works, enlarged to about 3 by 3 feet square. (They’re paired with Ethan Levitas’ photographs of New York subway cars.)

Each image requires persistence and luck. “If the planes are not directly overhead, if they are over five or six feet to the side, then they’re not good for me,” Milstein says. “I could spend an afternoon and come away with just one.... That’s usually 20 or 30 planes in one sitting, and the wait is sometimes 10 or 15 minutes between planes.”

After he finds an image he likes, he uses Photoshop to remove the sky -- to highlight the symmetry of the machinery and put it in a different context.

“It helps give the planes a personality, and make them more portrait-like,” says Laura Arnspiger, who organized the show along with owner Kopeikin. “They seem very simple, yet at the same time quite complex.”

All of the photos are of aircraft landing, Milstein says, because the pilots aim for the center of the runway -- thus increasing his chances of getting a perfect image.

NATURALLY, the airport police have been curious about his activity. “I’m stopped all the time, but because it’s the same cops usually, they know who I am,” the 61-year-old photographer says. “Some are friendly and some are not so friendly. I’ve only been asked to move once, when I was up on a hill sort of overlooking a fence. They asked me to find another spot, which I did.”

After 9/11, Milstein, who now lives in New York and flies frequently to L.A., took a year off from the project -- in part because of tighter security and in part “because no one was into looking at planes.”

When he resumed, the images carried darker associations, far more complex than his original fascination with planes. Yet he has kept that simpler spirit alive.

That’s why, when Milstein returns to L.A. on Saturday, he’ll most likely be taking up his position again to capture more planes for a book project. And these days, he’s even hoping for specific aircraft to photograph.

“Alaska Airlines has this plane painted like a big fish,” he says, referring to the Boeing 737-400 that’s been dubbed the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon. (Unveiled in October, it drew criticism when it was revealed that the airline received $500,000 in federal money from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, in large part to paint the plane.)

“One time it came in around midday, so I was hoping it would be there the next, but it wasn’t. The fact is, they move these things around a lot. But that would be a big one for me.”

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‘Aircraft’

Where: Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and Friday, and by appointment through Jan. 4

Info: (323) 937-0765, paulkopeikingallery.com