Airport #1 (8 x 8") (Print 7 of 15)

Location: Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Year: 2012

Size: 8 x 8” Image Size.

Limited Edition: Print 7 in an Edition of 15. Signed, dated and numbered.

Paper: Museum-Quality Archival Pigment Print.

Includes: Artist Stamped Certificate of Authenticity.

Details: Most people see an airplane graveyard.
But here, at the edge of a war, kids saw a kingdom.

In Goma, eastern Congo, abandoned planes sat rusting beside a runway scarred by years of conflict and even lava from a volcano that glows at night.

One afternoon in 2012, soldiers had fled the city.

Nobody was guarding the planes.

And kids took advantage of it, climbing the wings, running along the fuselage, disappearing into cockpits.

Planes are built for escape — symbols of privilege, distance, freedom.
But here the planes were powerless…claimed by children who owned almost nothing.

My friend later told me about the volcanic eruption years earlier — how he and many others pushed a plane across the tarmac to save it from lava, while his friend — who dreamed of becoming a pilot — sat in the cockpit steering the human chain away from the fire.

And now, years later, these kids climbed the same wreckage,
turning ruin into possibility — a kind of joy rising where the world expected nothing but sorrow.

I’ll never forget this day.
In a place shaped by conflict and extraction,
these children reclaimed what war tried to take — and imagined themselves into the sky.

From the series Airport. Published in Avaunt, the Guardian, Smithsonian, and others.