JH Engström – CDG / JHE

To most people an airport used to represent a place of optimism. An open place, oozing with expectations and encounters. Recent world events have changed all that. Today an airport is a completely different experience. Armed police officers, restrictions and safety regulations only help to increase our feelings of insecurity.

Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport has always been a special place for JH Engström (born 1969). At the age of ten he moved to Paris with his parents. Charles de Gaulle was his first contact with the world outside his native Sweden. The move created a very intense relationship to the city of Paris, but also to the Charles de Gaulle and airports in general.

For this project he spent three weeks isolated in an airport hotel, photographing in and between the terminals. The airport became a place to observe identities and the history of relations. With fiction, poetry and mystery he observes it. Raising questions of social, urban and architectural dimensions.