Up close, a fighter aircraft stops being a machine and becomes a landscape: rivets in long rows, sheet metal bent to the shape of the wind, a tangle of cables and hydraulic lines hidden behind a panel.

The only face here is painted on. A shark’s mouth on the nose – the kind of nose art crews once painted on their aircraft to give a machine a character, and perhaps a little courage to the people who flew it.

I photographed these aircraft in California in 2009. In black and white, without the colour of the paint, what remains is form: the work of engineers, mechanics and pilots, written into metal.