Concorde Grid is a series of fifty-six color photographs of equal size that are displayed in a grid four rows high and fourteen columns wide. The series, shot as part of a commission for the Chisenhale Gallery, (London), on the occasion of I Didn’t Inhale, (Tillmans’ solo exhibition in 1997) was shot at a number of sites in and around London.
Several photographs of the plane landing and taking off from the airport were taken looking through the security fence, near the Heathrow airport perimeter fence which is included in the image as a blurry outline, while other photographs were taken from points of views such as suburban railroad tracks, roads near the airport, a yard containing parked trucks, and an open Municipality.
The plane depicted in different scales and seen from a wide variety of angles recurs in the representation giving image after image a different impression.
The project, characterized by an obsessive and recurrent reproduction of the same subject, takes on the character of a monitoring or a recording not unlike that of a birdwatcher.
The author writes:
“Concorde is perhaps the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functioning today. Its futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs people’s imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. It’s an environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit … For the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to watch it in the air, landing or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.”
Although not devoid of social attention, Tillmans’ visual investigation in Concorde describes something more than the mere objectivity of the scene. In the work of facts, the formal choices made in the shooting of the subject tell us both this and (as reported above in the words of the same author) the experience and the show that the Concorde, as an event, produces.
Reasoning a vision that sees the postural approach to the subject represented, the author captures and collects the sensation of this, giving life to a set of visions in which it is possible to intercept the emotional oscillation of the author himself who, now amazed, now melancholic, now distant, seems to look at things to hear his own noise.