Concorde (1997)

• Published: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 1997
• Edition: First edition
• Binding: Illustrated wrappers
• Pages: 128 pp.
• Dimensions: Octavo
• Language: English / German
• Condition: Close to near fine; a bump to the spine.

In the spring of 1997 Tillmans spent weeks as a planespotter, waiting under the flight path by the perimeter fence at Heathrow, and in Richmond and Clapham, for Concorde to appear. The pictures show the supersonic airliner as most people knew it: a distant, unmistakable shape crossing the sky over London's suburbs.

Tillmans saw Concorde as perhaps the last techno-utopian invention of the 1960s still in service, and the book holds both its beauty and its environmental cost. Six years later the fleet was retired, and Concorde now reads as an elegy for a future that never arrived. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger included it in the second volume of The Photobook: A History.

The first edition of 1997, published by Walther König in Cologne. The book has since been reprinted several times.