Roz Doherty Throws Us Back Into a Period When Air Piracy Was a Very Common Occurrence
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Published21 Nov 2022
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Author
Playing with set photography and the identikit, Roz Doherty reflects on the reasons why one would decide to take an entire plane hostage.
After 9/11 airport security has accustomed us to long and thorough checks and to cockpits well protected by bullet-proof doors. But there was a time when the doors were left open, and children could meet the pilots. Roz Doherty tells us about a different and more dangerous type of cockpit visitor.
Between 1968 and 1972 air piracy was astonishingly commonplace in America, with over 130 planes being hijacked during this period. Happening as frequently as once a week, hijackers sought political asylum in Cuba or demanded money as a resolution to their often-desperate circumstances. Yet this remains a largely unknown and unremembered period of history.
The Vietnam war had proved to be massively unpopular, the idealism from the 1960s was a thing of the past, and public hysteria was being stoked by the mass media. All the while politics was seen to be failing to end the epidemic of hijacking, interwoven with this is the psychology of these disenchanted and desperate men who felt that their circumstances were such that the only solution was seen to be the hijack of a commercial plane. A way out.
Occupying a hybrid documentary space between image, information, and fiction, the work explores how we re-imagine events with limited visual clues to support the lyrical responses we create.
Words and pictures by Roz Doherty
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Roz Doherty (b. 1983) is a British photographer, whose work focuses on the intersection of myth, fiction, and truth. She graduated from Bradford College with a BA (Hons) in Photography in 2019 and recently graduated with an MFA in Photography from the Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.
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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.
