Post-transit

After a week long trip to the United States, including four red-eye flights, only two nights staying over in hotels, each night being a different hotel, working the exhibition traffic at a premiere high tech advertising conference, I’m back. The trip also included a few client meetings, a conference call with me and Mo hovering over a mobile phone in an abandoned cafeteria next door to the exhibition hall in full-blown construction mode and the accompanying noise.

One of my favorite moments was sitting on an ottoman in the lobby of the Bank of America in the Empire State Building implementing an intermediary tracking script for a foreign currency trading site. Fringe benefits of working for ForgeBusiness :-) Perhaps Kev is right in saying that enjoying that kind of thing makes me something of a wanabe – me – I just think its kewl enjoying the little poetic ironies in life as much as possible.

I came back with 250 photographs and I’ll probably post a few of my favorites here over the next while.

This one is my current favorite from the set. I know there is a whole sub-culture of photographers who focus on subway or tube photography. I wonder if it is classified as a subset of street photography genre – given its propensity to yield the same a-glimpse-of-humanity kind of feel, and how well it lends itself to black-and-white treatment.

Apart from its personal in-transit memoir factors I think this image it is also pretty successful in formal terms. Has a strong composition, some nice little graphic rhythms and an ample measure of implicit narrative. I also like the subtle dynamics, the dramas and contrasts, how the coach bursting into the scene is welded into the space by the darkness and the tension between the silhouetted figures and between them and the train. The details I think allow one’s eye to travel and explore a kind of paradoxical mixture of intimacy and distance.

PS. There was talk of making subway photography illegal without a permit because of the supposed terrorism threat, looks like that’s blown over though, no-one tried to stop me nor did I see any signs in the NY subway.

The New York Times > New York Region > Want Shots Like This? Get a Permit