Growing up in the 70s was an exposure to a very specific visual aesthetic. Things looked a certain way. Ridley Scott established a definitive style with his Chanel no 5 commercial. Movado watches denoting time with a single gold dot was high fashion. The Concorde was how the rich and famous exemplified how much their time was worth. It's dark twin, the US Air Force's SR71 Blackbird patrolled the night skies. This particular beast had the benefit of the US Government's equally dark money when it came to secret military budgets. If it needed to be built out of titanium to save weight and keep it from falling apart in flight, and if the US didn't have enough of this metal on hand to do so, we would just surreptitiously buy it from the Russians, whom we'd then use the finished product to spy on. Whatever it took, whatever it cost, make it happen.
Which made it an outlandish, impossible achievement -- its records remain unbroken 50 years after inception.
But for me, it was a statement of American supremacy and visual beauty. The lunar lander by comparison was obtuse, bumpy, ungainly. It didn't need to be streamlined to make its way to the surface of the airless moon after all. The Blackbird however... well that thing could have been a work of art even if it never left the ground. It was simply gorgeous. And inspirational.
I had to hunt down the opportunity to get some really beautiful shots of this thing. It was not easy. There were only 32 of them ever built, 20 surviving, all in museums. So how did I get these shots?
That's what's in the coffee table book. Along with a number of gorgeous images like this.
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