Photographing History: The CAF AirPower History Tour in Millington

Aug 26
5 min read

There are some subjects that are interesting to photograph, and then there are subjects that almost seem to carry their own weight before you ever raise the camera.

The Commemorative Air Force AirPower History Tour was definitely one of those.

From August 19–23, the tour made a stop at Millington-Memphis Airport, bringing several historic aircraft to West Tennessee and giving visitors the opportunity to see, hear and experience machines that most of us have only encountered through photographs, documentaries or history books.

I had the chance to spend some time at the airport photographing the tour during its stay in Millington, and this was one assignment I had been looking forward to for a while.

The obvious centerpiece was “FIFI,” the B-29 Superfortress.

You can know the dimensions of a B-29. You can look at photographs of one. You can watch old wartime footage and understand on paper that it is a large airplane.

None of that really prepares you for standing underneath one.

Walking onto the ramp and seeing FIFI sitting there completely changes your sense of scale. The wings seem to stretch forever. The four engines dominate the aircraft from almost any angle, and standing near the nose gives you a much better appreciation for just how much airplane is behind you.

As a photographer, that immediately creates a challenge: How do you make a photograph communicate something your eyes are experiencing in person?

A wide-angle photograph can show the entire aircraft, but sometimes it is the smaller frames that tell more of the story.

The rivets running through the aluminum skin.

The markings painted across the fuselage.

The curvature of the cockpit glass.

The propellers and enormous radial engines.

The weathering, reflections and imperfections in the metal.

Even the way the morning light moves across the polished surface tells you something about the aircraft.

Those were the details I kept finding myself drawn toward.

More Than One Airplane

While FIFI naturally received much of the attention, the ramp offered far more than the B-29.

The tour also brought aircraft including the T-6 Texan, PT-13 Stearman and B-25 Mitchell, each representing another piece of aviation history and each completely different to photograph.

That variety is part of what made covering the tour so interesting.

One moment I could be photographing the enormous profile of the B-29 and looking for a composition that showed its scale. A few minutes later, I could be working around the bright colors and open cockpit of the Stearman or looking at the lines of the B-25.

Every aircraft had its own personality.

And when several of them are sitting together on the same ramp, the photographs begin to become more than individual portraits of airplanes. They start telling the story of an era of aviation when aircraft design was advancing at an incredible pace and thousands of pilots, aircrew members, mechanics and support personnel were learning to operate machines unlike anything that had existed only a few years earlier.

That history is still physically present in these aircraft.

When the Aircraft Comes to Life

Photographing a historic aircraft sitting on the ramp is one experience.

Hearing it start is something completely different.

The quiet details suddenly give way to movement. Propellers begin turning. Engines come alive. The sound travels across the airport, and the aircraft that had looked almost museum-like moments earlier becomes a functioning airplane again.

That was one of the parts of the experience I wanted the photographs to capture.

A B-29 is impressive sitting still.

Watching one move under its own power makes you realize that this is not simply an artifact preserved behind a rope. FIFI remains a flying piece of history.

There is something pretty incredible about watching an aircraft designed more than eight decades ago taxi across a modern airport ramp and knowing that, somewhere along the way, generations of people have put in the time, money, knowledge and work necessary to keep it flying.

For a photographer, those moments disappear quickly.

The angle changes. The light changes. The aircraft moves. People move into and out of the frame.

Suddenly the shot you saw a few seconds earlier no longer exists.

That is the part of photography I enjoy most — finding those brief moments and trying to preserve them before they are gone.

Photographing the Details

I approached much of this assignment the same way I approach other photojournalism work.

Get the establishing photographs.

Show where we are.

Show the scale.

Then start looking closer.

Instead of only trying to make another clean photograph of a B-29, I wanted to find the frames that felt like actually being there.

Looking upward from beneath a wing.

Seeing the aircraft reflected through glass.

Watching visitors stop and study details they may never have seen before.

Compressing parts of the aircraft together with a longer lens.

Finding angles where the size of the engines or fuselage becomes almost abstract.

And, of course, stepping back far enough every once in a while to remind yourself just how big the entire thing actually is.

Some of my favorite photographs from the tour ended up being the ones that showed only a portion of an aircraft.

Photography has a way of making you slow down and notice things that are easy to overlook otherwise. When you spend enough time walking around something with a camera, you begin looking beyond the obvious subject and start paying attention to texture, geometry, light and the small evidence of the people who have kept these machines operating.

A Short Visit, and a Lot of History

The AirPower History Tour was only in Millington for a few days.

That is part of what made having it here special.

For a short time, people in our area could walk onto the ramp at Millington-Memphis Airport and stand just a few feet away from aircraft connected directly to one of the most significant periods in American and world history.

For me, I was fortunate enough to experience it from behind the camera.

I came away with plenty of photographs of airplanes, but hopefully the collection shows a little more than that.

The scale.

The mechanical details.

The people.

The movement.

And the strange feeling that comes from standing next to something built in another era and then watching it taxi away under its own power.

It is one thing to see a B-29 in a history book or on a screen.

It is another thing entirely to hear four engines running in front of you, feel the sound across the ramp, watch that massive aircraft begin to move and have a camera in your hands when it happens.

A sincere thank you to the Commemorative Air Force and Millington-Memphis Airport for bringing the AirPower History Tour to our area and for the opportunity to spend some time documenting its short stay in Millington.