Jeffrey Milstein‘s “London From the Air” is a breathtaking testament to his unique ability to capture urban landscapes with architectural precision and artistic flair. This award-winning project, which earned a Gold in the Graphis Photography 2024 competition showcases the iconic city of London from stunning aerial perspectives. Commissioned by Rizzoli New York, Milstein’s images transform the city’s architecture and streets into mesmerizing patterns and compositions, revealing the metropolis’s intricate beauty and complex connectivity. Through his lens, familiar landmarks and everyday scenes are reimagined, offering viewers a fresh and captivating view of London.
By: Jeffery Milstein, Photographer, Jeffrey Milstein Photography
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s, my two interests were airplanes and drawing. I built all the model airplanes I could afford to buy, and I drew and painted pictures of the stylish cars and new jet airliners of the day.
In 1960, at 16, I began taking flying lessons at Santa Monica Airport with the money I earned from an after-school job. I passed my flight test on my 17th birthday (the minimum age). The flight school would give me an hour in a Cessna 150 in return for sweeping out a giant hangar on Sunday mornings. I would fly over Los Angeles, taking pictures of the city with an 8mm movie camera. I loved seeing everything going on in the city below: cars driving downtown, people swimming at the beach, a baseball game, you could see it all. It was thrilling to pilot the small yellow and blue plane around the clouds, free to go wherever I felt like (this was a long time ago before all the controlled airspace rules).
I would be drawing and painting when I wasn’t reading flying magazines. In high school, I studied art with an influential teacher who taught us about the Bauhaus, where some of the foremost contemporary painters, graphic artists, and architects worked and taught. It opened my eyes to what good design looked like. After high school, I went to the University of California at Berkeley, where I studied architecture and art. As students, we were required to get a 35mm camera and start documenting our work. I bought a second-hand Argus C-3, 35mm camera, and began taking pictures. It was the first of many cameras which would come much later.
After graduating, I worked for an architect firm in San Francisco before moving to New York City in 1969, where I earned my architect license. In 1975, I moved upstate to Woodstock, NY, where I started my own firm. I designed primarily alternative build-it-yourself shelters and small, efficient solar homes. Many of my designs were published in magazines such as Abitare. In 1975, I co-authored a book with another architect called Designing Houses: A Guide to Designing Your Own House (Overlook Press).
In 1983, I started a design/publishing company, Paper House Productions, with a set of six die-cut architectural note cards. Over the next 17 years, the little company grew much more significant with an extensive line of note cards, many of which used photographs I took. In 1996, I attended a photo workshop with the highly acclaimed photographer Jay Maisel to learn more about photography. Jay inspired me enormously, and I decided photography would be my third career. In 2000, I sold the company, set up a photography studio near my home in upstate New York, and began to photograph (what else?) airplanes!
My first photographic portfolio was of jetliners flying low overhead as they were about to land. My goal was to capture highly detailed photographs in perfect symmetry at the exact moment they were precisely overhead. The images, which had the formal look of architectural or engineering drawings, were widely published and became my first photography book, Aircraft: The Jet as Art, published by Abrams in 2007. The photos made their way to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in 2011, where I had a year-long solo exhibit.
In 2012, more than fifty years after I first photographed Los Angeles from a small plane, I decided to return to the air with the newest high-resolution digital cameras available to photograph cities once more. Over several years, I made flights in small planes and helicopters over New York and Los Angeles, having other pilots do the flying while I concentrated on aerial shooting.
One of my favorite types of image is the straight-down shot, a kind of architectural plan view that has become a signature style of mine over the years. It is a more difficult type of shooting because to achieve the straight-down shot, the pilot has to make steep, tight circles (not all of them like doing that) while I lean out the open door, hand-holding the camera. There is vibration from the rotor, added G-force from the tightly banked turns, and blowing wind.
As I frame my photographs, I look for how the lighting is affecting the shot (my favorite time of day being the last bit of sun), as well as the perspective angles, patterns, symmetry, balance, color, and framing (no doubt influenced by Mrs. Schamm, my highschool art teacher).
In 2017, the photos of Los Angeles and New York were published by Thames & Hudson in a book titled LA NY.
In early 2016, I was asked by Bloomberg Magazine to photograph Gatwick Airport for a magazine article. This was the start of my photography in Europe. Later that year, I was vacationing in London with my college-age daughter, Lucy. She had flown with me before on a helicopter photo flight over LA and was one of the only passengers I had flown with who could take the steep turns without getting sick. She kept asking me to take her over London. I had a camera with me, and I finally agreed. It turned out to be a great flight, with many photos appearing in this book, including the perfect overview of the Gherkin. The London controllers are very restrictive with the higher airspace over London because of air traffic into Heathrow. I really wanted that shot, so the pilot asked the controllers if we could get higher over the Gherkin. The controllers gave us four minutes. Luckily, we were able to nail the shot.
In 2017, I photographed Amsterdam and Rotterdam at the request of my art dealer in the Netherlands. After photographing there, I took a train to Paris, where I hoped to photograph the city. I discovered that the French authorities did not, in fact, allow photographers to fly over the city and that only a tiny handful have ever received this permission. When I first contacted Helifirst, my Paris helicopter company, they told me Paris does not allow photographers over the city, and I would have to be content with a circle around Paris. I would not be able to get the straight-down photographs that had made my work in other cities so distinctive. Rebecca Moreau of Helifirst said I could make an application. It would cost $500 EU and take three months, and I probably wouldn’t get it. But she went to bat for me. I would have to show it was in the public interest. In the spring of 2019, I submitted the application. I got letters from French publishers and museum curators and sent them my LANY book, explaining that how I wanted to photograph differed from anything done before.
In May 2019, I was on a panel at Photo London, and I decided to shoot London again when I came for the panel and then head over to Paris with the hope that permission would come. The day before we were scheduled to return home, we amazingly received permission. They would allow me two 45-minute flights over central Paris! I got my first flight in before I left and returned in June for the second flight. With the photos I got over Paris and some additional flights around the outer ring (which were allowed) and over Versailles, I produced my first book with Rizzoli, Paris From the Air, published in April 2021. The book has won several design awards.
In November 2022, I had a show of my aerials at Messums Gallery in London. I brought a camera but had not planned an aerial flight, preferring warmer months for flying with the door open. But when we were walking around the streets at night around Piccadilly, we saw all the festive Christmas lights hanging above the streets. My girlfriend Kim said, “You should get a helicopter and photograph this from the air.” With her help, I managed to line up a helicopter for the next day, and the weather was good. The colorful photos comprise the Christmas section of the book.
In May 2023, I returned to London to photograph a fourth time and get what was needed to finish the book. In a very successful 2.5-hour flight, I obtained everything I set out to get except Kew Gardens, which the NATS controllers would not allow.
Jeffrey Milstein’s Book Foreword
London from the air can provoke other insights from the past, such as the city’s Roman roots of a Thames River crossing to its more modern foundation in the period from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, following the Great Fire. These and other layers of history are brought alive by the vivid and beautiful record of Jeffrey Milstein’s airborne journey across one of the world’s great cities.
Jeffrey Milstein is a photographer, architect, and pilot. His photographs have been exhibited and collected throughout the world and have been featured in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Esquire, Fortune, Harpers, Vanity Fair, GEO, GQ, Paris Match, Liberation, and Die Zeit. He has won numerous awards, including Graphis Gold Awards, and has been featured on CNN and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley. His work is in the collections of museums including the Scottish National Galleries, LACMA, George Eastman House, Musée de l’Elysée, Portland Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where he had a year-long solo show of his aircraft. His books include Aircraft the Jet as Art (Abrams), Paris From the Air (Rizzoli), LA NY (Thames and Hudson), and Cuba (Monacelli). He is represented by major galleries in the US and overseas. His studio is in Kingston, New York.
