This year, the Atlanta Photography Group’s (APG) annual APG > Airport Exhibition juror is Lisa Volpe, Associate Curator of Photography for the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. She has selected 30 photographs to exhibit in the central atrium of the world’s busiest airport: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). ATL has an average of 260,000 visitors per day, making this an opportunity to have your photographs seen by literally millions of travelers from all over the world.

We’ve all experienced the temporal oddity of the airport. It’s a place where the lights are always on, cocktails are appropriate at any hour, and naptime has no fixed schedule. Waiting is the most ubiquitous activity: waiting for a flight, for a taxi, to get there, to get home. The airport is about waiting for the future moment to arrive. Could it be that photographs are the perfect medium for this liminal location? As many famous photo theorists have discussed, photos are similarly out of time. By and large, they depict a precise moment in time—a single fleeting moment, now relegated to the past. Yet, that present moment lives on into the future. As Roland Barthes noted, it is the “eternal present” of the photograph, balanced with its stubborn pointing to the “has been,” that makes the medium unique. In both contexts—the airport and the photograph—the character of time is changed.

The 30 photographs chosen for exhibition in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), represent a broad spectrum of artistic practice. From landscapes, to constructed scenes, to impressions of everyday life, each photograph captures the “eternal present” and points to the “has been.” I hope that many of the airport’s 260,000 visitors per day spend time engaged with these images, filling those liminal moments with impressive artistry.