albertonewyork

I am a journalist and photographer in New York. I was born in Milan, and lived in Rome and Atlanta. I have a European Union passport in one pocket, an American passport in the other, and I like using them often.

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The Alps from an Airbus A380

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New York City from the air

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Above Santiago, Chile

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Cerro Altar and Cerro El Plomo from the top of Cerro Manquehue, Chile

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Santiago de Chile, April 2018. Smog so thick you can see it. From the top of Cerro Manquehue, 5500 ft.   

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The immense construction site for Mexico City’s new airport. This is what it looks like a minute after taking off from the old one.

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The northeastern outskirts of Beijng from the air, March 2018 

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Corsica, summer. Spy would not go home until the last of her humans returned from swimming or windsurfing or fishing. She waited on the beach, looking out at the horizon, and then trotted back to the house with us, as scruffy and salty as everybody else.

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Capo Corso, a late afternoon in midsummer

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Corsica, on a windy day

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Corsican Waves

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The Mont Rose massif and the Weisshorn, top

The Mischabel chain, bottom 

Swiss and Italian Alps, February 2018 

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A Trumpian Moment From the Middle East

Last November, I was in Dubai covering an aviation trade show. Alongside the civilian plane makers selling Airbuses and Boeings to airlines, defense companies showed off their wares. Among them was Lockheed Martin, whose F-16 made demo flights every day of the show — performing, like in the photo above I took on a rare blue-sky day, for a crowd heavy with generals and officials from governments with deep pockets and long lists of enemies. Many of the Americans at the show were ex-military types, buzz-cut men in khakis who talked in Power Point or in Engineerese, and made no mystery of what they were doing there: Selling deadly, expensive toys to people with crazy oil and gas money.     

One morning on a shuttle bus to the airshow, two of them were behind me, talking in Southern accents.      

“He's not the guy I thought he'd be,” said one. “I want a businessman. But he's too thin-skinned. He's a bully who can dish it out but can't take it.” I never heard him mention the president’s name, or whether he had voted for him, but there was no mistaking it. Here was a Republican, a die-hard Republican by the looks of it, who had soured on the president and was loud about it. 

“He said there's some good people in Charlottesville. No there’s not!” he went on, in a tone of disbelief. “I never listened to John Kasich, but...” he trailed off. 

He was the real deal: He and his friend spoke knowledgeably about Boeings, reminisced about stories from deployments, talked about how “the military puts the aviation industry to shame” when it comes to partying. Contractors, I thought. They were fun to listen to, and surprisingly un-straight — “I smoked dope with a lieutenant colonel in the Philippines! Ah shoulda been in jail!” — but what I kept going back to was, this is his base. These are his people. And they’re hating on him, hard.

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Long Island from above on a clear night, out the window of a flight to Milan.

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Two cameras, a passport, 10 euros, and a credit card: You don’t need anything else to travel. (Toothbrush not pictured. Back from a week in Italy, North Africa and the Middle East.)

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One World Trade Center on a windy December afternoon, from the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn.

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La Guardia is really an urban airport, sandwiched between Queens on the left and the Bronx on the right. In the middle, the Rikers Island prison complex is an ominous presence.