Maxime Guyon’s latest project takes a fascinating – and beautiful – look at the aeronautics industry

The project began in 2017, just after Maxime released Toothbrushes with Same Paper. “I was quite willing to start a whole new project based on a bigger technological species,” Maxime explains of how Aircraft: The New Anatomy is a continuation of his previous research in the field. On why he chose to turn his camera on the aeronautical industry in particular, he says: “We are definitely living through a particular change in the aircraft industry, especially with the awareness of the environmental impact of aviation but also more recently with the economic airline recession due to the global coronavirus outbreak. These events are and will drastically change the method of production but also our perception regarding this sector.”

On a purely aesthetic level, Maxime also has “an interest in visually observing the evolution of the shapes and design of aircrafts”, and this is often the fundamental premise of his work. Throughout his portfolio, Maxime draws our eyes to the ingenuity and craft of technological objects, no matter how big or small, by spotlighting details of their configuration. In turn, he celebrates the “form follows function” principle and the post-industrial aesthetics that dictate, and are borne from, the objects of our daily lives.

“I am fascinated by images and compositions, I think a detail can suggest far more than a wide and literal portrait of a subject,” Maxime tells It’s Nice That. “Moreover, these intense accumulations of details that these aircraft technologies undergo are the witness of a spectacular concretisation.” The latter refers to an essay that features at the back of Aircraft: The New Anatomy, written by Nicolas Nova. Broadly, it denotes the idea that incredible feats of engineering – like aircraft – are the amalgamation of several smaller yet equally incredible feats. What Maxime does is highlight that fact, heralding gratitude to the coalescence of technology that makes aeronautics possible.

This levelling of the playing field, as it were, is also furthered by Maxime’s strictly consistent approach to photographing. “I like to challenge the visual representations of technologies but also the norms of photographic outcomes,” he tells us, achieved by employing the norms of commercial photography in a more artistic setting. In turn, discourse related to the “desirability of high-end technology” is imbued within his work.

Ultimately, the project also comments on how technology and nature have evolved in tandem, even positing that discussing one in isolation from the other or as distinct entities is erroneous. This concept is often referred to as “third nature”. He explains: “In my opinion, technology is actually part of nature. Saying that technology is replicating nature is a bit abstract and too human-centred. Humans are part of nature and so too are technological species.” Aircraft: The New Anatomy can therefore be seen as a documentation of natural selection. Maxime photographs parts of the Concorde, for example, from which many of today’s aeroplanes descend. It’s something Nicolas also alludes to in his essay when he discusses the work of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, colleagues who proposed development to Darwinism in 1972 and who had earlier drawn comparisons between the stints of evolution apparent in fossils and in that of the cornet, a wind instrument. Nicolas also references the work of British writer Samuel Butler who, in 1863, referred to machines as a “mechanical kingdom”.