Attracted by their haptic and morphologic quality, the German photographer Thomas Florschuetz (*1957 in Saxony) uses his camera to explore the surface of fighter jets. Textures, lines, juxtaposing color planes, light deflections, and absorptions are explored in all their visual richness and so convey the immediacy of vision. By concentrating on details, magnifying the scale, and reiterating the subjects from different angles, the jets take on an abstract quality, which Florschuetz arranges as if he were composing a painting. The once lethal war-machines lined up in orderly ranks in the Sonora Desert in Arizona are thus mutated into something more akin to paleontological remains whose signs of transience such as scratches and patina undermine the quest for technological supremacy.

The aesthetic properties of fighter jets-their textures, lines and colors-are advanced in Thomas Florschuetz's latest monograph. Photographing these jets in the Sonora Desert in Arizona, Florschuetz (born 1957) abstracts and recomposes their qualities so that the martial purposes of these once-lethal war machines are almost neutralized, and reassigned as archeological remains.