Bringing Pan Am Back To Life: Photographing And Lighting The First Class Cabin of a 747

I’m a bit of a dreamer. I’m also a huge aviation geek, and I often catch myself browsing the web at 2am looking up articles on aviation and aviation history. So when I found Anthony Toth and learned more about his life’s work, I knew that I had my next personal photography project in mind. As I’m mostly anarchitectural photographer, I got bored of waiting around for an airline to hire me to photograph their next ad campaign, so I decided to hire myself into my dream gig.

Over the course of three days of scouting, two days of shooting, endless phone calls and organizational headaches, I managed to put together my dream shoot. Here’s how I did it in both video and text form.For an in-depth behind the scenes look, check out the video and read the text. Finished photos can be seen at the bottom of the post or by going to my website.

About Anthony Toth’s Pan Am 747

I am not exactly sure how I first learned about Anthony Toth and his project, to be honest, but I can remember my reactions to seeing what he’d done. Awe, disbelief, and utter respect were just a few. Anthony had, over the course of 30 or so years, restored the cabin of a Pan-Am 747-200 to exactly the way it would have been in the 1970s. No detail was overlooked, from the working lavatory lights and galleys to the working overhead bins, the original ashtrays, peanut packages, and cutlery. Stepping into Anthony’s creation can be a bit disconcerting – the detail is so incredible that you quickly begin to believe that you are actually in a plane, 30,000 feet above the ocean. Stepping out after spending a few hours in it feels like arriving at a new destination, and to not walk out onto the jetway you expect to be there, is, well, quite bizarre at first.

Anthony himself, as you would expect, is probably the biggest aviation geek you’ll ever meet, a badge he wears proudly. Ever since he was a little kid and would fly Pan Am to see relatives, he would collect souvenirs from every flight he took. Matchbooks, magazines, seatback safety cards, and on and on. He would record the audio of a flight with a handheld recorder, and play it back over and over again. He didn’t know it at the time, but this collection would grow into one of the largest aviation-related prop houses in the world.

As his collection grew, Toth realized that he had needed to start putting it all together. He began making calls to Southern California’s renowned aircraft boneyards, where retired planes are stored before being sold for scrap. Over time, he began to amass what would be the first iteration of his homegrown 747. Taking trips in a Honda CRV, he would travel all over California finding the pieces he needed: a seat there, a galley cart there, an overhead bin. Using his garage, he began to re-assemble the first class cabin of a Pan-Am 747, recreating the experiences he had as a child.

His first version of the project garnered him plenty of media attention and interest from the public – but he knew it wasn’t perfect. Toth wanted the entire experience, and his garage wasn’t letting him build out the plane the way he wanted. A few years ago, he decided to move his entire setup to a new location in East Los Angeles. Over the course of two years, Toth disassembled and re-assembled his entire cabin, building a support structure in the new warehouse to support the upper deck, a version of coach class, and the original first class. Hiring contractors and Hollywood prop specialists to put the plane together piece by piece, the project began to take shape, and his Pan Am 747 came to life.

As a result of his project, Toth became a sort of legend in the aviation world. He regularly hosts dinners in the cabin, inviting guests to fly the friendly skies, complete with original Pan Am flight attendants serving the exact same meals that Pan Am served, catered by the same company that originally made them. The flight doesn’t miss and details: Toth’s recordings of the Pan Am experience are piped in through a built in sound system, so you hear everything from engine spool up to flaps retracting and landing gear doors closing. Caviar and vodka is served as an appetizer, and guests are led to the upper deck dining room for dinner, just like in the old days.

He’s hosted television shows, worked as an advisor to television shows, and provides props for shows and movies. When the recent drama ‘Pan Am’ was released, it was Toth who was called to be the expert on everything from the way the flight attendants interacted in the cabin to the way the ticketing system worked. He did the same for Mad Men, and has supplied props for countless productions.

About the shoot

And yet, despite all this, there was no evidence that the location had ever been used for a photoshoot depicting the glory days of aviation. There had been plenty of marketing and editorial pieces shot in the cabin, which was mostly used for creating a smokey, sexy type of scene (Playboy, among others, have become regular clients of Toth’s). I took a few minutes to let my brain run wild, and tracked down an email address so that I could send Toth my ideas. I told him who I was, what I did, and how as an interiors and architecture photographer, I wanted to shoot and document his project. Seemingly a little skeptical at first, he agreed to meet up for lunch and to discuss some ideas. After our brainstorming session, we realized that we had a huge project on our hands. We wanted to get Pan Am flying again, if it was only captured by our cameras for a brief instant.

My mind began to turn with ideas. How were we going to shoot it? Who was going to model? How would I light it? There were tons and tons of logistical and organizational hurdles. Being an architectural photographer, I don’t usually work with models, and when I do it’s only a couple people at most. We wanted to fill an entire plane with people and give them direction on what to do and how to pose. I also knew were were going to have to light this thing, but how? And how did I want the photos to look? The final look that we had in mind would determine everything from how we lit it to how the people dressed.

Scouting
The more I thought about the shoot, the more exciting the whole thing seemed. And at the same time, the more I realized that I had to come up with a lot of solutions to challenges I hadn’t worked through before. I visited the location a number of time leading up to the shoot, becoming more and more enamored with Anthony and the plane he had built every time. Both Anthony and myself agreed that we wanted this to be as authentic as possible in every way, so the lighting and staging had to look real. I played with a number of potential lighting setups and ran through a variety of compositional possibilities before making a final decision. Knowing how I’d light and shoot it would be immensely helpful when I went to plan out how many models I’d need, where they’d be, and how they’d be posed in each shot.

Which, of course, led to the next issue: finding the people who would act as models. Like I said, being an architectural photographer, I don’t have the biggest network of models in my rolodex, so Anthony and I had to improvise. We called on a number of friends who had an interest in aviation, and who would love to be a part of getting Pan Am off the ground again. This made for a great mix of models – young and old, with a range of personalities. Once we had the models lines up, we had to figure out how to dress them in attire true to the period. Each model had a meeting with a wardrobe stylist, hair stylist, and makeup artist to be touched up and get into costume. The flight attendants wore original Pan Am outfits that- you guessed it – Anthony had collected over the years. They were each authentic, and worn by an original stewardess – some of them even had the names and home base still written on them of the person who wore them.

Once we had the models in place, the next matter became filling out the cabin with the touches that would make it 100% authentic. We decided on re-creating the entire Pan Am dining experience, plated as it would have been in Pan Am’s heyday and delivered to the passengers by the flight attendants still fresh and hot. Using Anthony’s contacts, we hired the Flying Food Group, a company that provides food for long-haul air travel, who catered it in (seriously) one of those scissors trucks that you see on the ramp whenever you fly. Absolutely too cool! We gave them a menu ahead of time and had the entire thing ready to order: from the Russian black sea sturgeon caviar to the Finlandia vodka, a full appetizer of tomato and mozzarella, the hot medium-rare roast garnished in front of the passengers, and a full dessert menu including a variety of hot and cold cakes and drinks.

Which introduced (yet another) hurdle to overcome: not only was I dealing with shooting an interior, a hard task in and of itself, but an interior filled with 20-odd passengers, all posed and dressed, and on top of that, we had to make the food look appetizing in photos, which is no simple feat. Making three types of photography happen at once in a cramped airplane cabin was an enormous juggling act – the timing had to be impeccable, and we were running an incredibly tight shot schedule consisting of 15 photos for the day.