Landing Lights Park

Landing Lights Park is David Rothenberg’s 2018 photobook about the Queens neighborhood beneath the final approach to LaGuardia Airport, published by ROMAN NVMERALS.

The book looks at East Elmhurst, a working-class neighborhood where jets cross an undeveloped stretch called Landing Lights Park about every 90 seconds, at heights as low as 150 feet. Residents live with the noise and the polluted air. Rothenberg sets details of the neighborhood beside planes that seem stuck in trees or tangled in wires and faces of passengers at their windows, and he describes the sequence as a run of disorienting collisions within an ordinary landscape. Gideon Jacobs contributes short essays. A 2018 Queens Art Fund New Works Grant supported the project. A second edition, limited to 200 copies, has 68 pages and 30 photographs at 8.25 by 12 inches.

Rothenberg is a photographer and educator living in New York, and he has made Queens, his home borough, the subject of several projects. TIME named Landing Lights Park one of the 25 best photobooks of 2018. His book Roosevelt Station won the PHOTO 2021 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize.