Faculty Profile: McGhee Professor Frank Cost Loves to Fly :)

A Quick Look Back at almost a Half of Century of Flying Model Airplanes
by Frank Cost

RIT Advertising Photography major Meghan Marin has been working on a project for Clay McBride’s class to make portraits of people holding objects that represent their deeply-rooted interests and passions. Meghan asked me whether I would be willing to have my portrait taken holding a model airplane. I suggested using a small model of a Taylorcraft, the light plane flown by my parents from which I had taken my first aerial photographs back in the 1970s. The Taylorcraft is similar to a Piper Cub, but with pilot and passenger sitting side by side instead of one in back of the other. The model weighs less than two ounces and can be flown by remote control with great precision.

Meghan wanted to photograph me at the Rochester airport with some light private aircraft tied up on the tarmac as her backdrop. But on the early November day of the planned shoot, the temperature was close to freezing and it was raining hard—impossible to set up for photographing outside. So we gained permission from the Rochester Air Center to make a portrait in their large hangar the next morning. Meghan directed the shoot and I complied to the best of my ability with her directions. Here’s the portrait Meghan made:

When she sent me the photograph I realized it is strikingly similar to a picture in our family album of an early teenage me holding a model airplane sometime in the 1960s. I built the model out of balsa wood and tissue paper, and it was powered by a wound-up rubber band.

Here’s that picture:

I wish I could go back to the younger version of myself and describe the fantastic changes that would happen to photography and to the technologies of model aviation in the next half century. I would also probably try to reassure the nerdy bespectacled teenager that he would someday miraculously find a way to make a living teaching people how to make pictures with magical electronic cameras mounted on remote-controlled model aircraft—like these two panoramic images of the RIT campus made consecutively in rapidly-changing light earlier this fall.

About the Author:

Frank Cost is the current James E. McGhee Distinguished Professor in the School of Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. The professorship was created in the late 1960s by the photographic industry, led by the Photo Marketing Association and Eastman Kodak Company, to study emerging trends in consumer photography and prepare graduates to become innovators in the industry. That mission continues to the present day, although the leading industry players in consumer imaging are almost completely different from the original founders of the professorship. Cost has been photographing professionally since 1975, and has authored both textbooks and experimental photobooks exploring new forms of graphic expression enabled by digital technologies. He has taught a wide variety of courses in the field of visual media for more than three decades. He received a B.A. in World Studies from Eisenhower College in 1976 and an M.S. in Computer Science from RIT in 1987. He can be contacted at frank.cost@rit.edu.