Faces in Transit
I took these pictures for a course at the Universitaet der Kuenste.
One of my favorite film sequences comes in Himmel ueber Berlin (Wings of Desire), directed by Wim Wenders: the camera pans across a number of mostly somber Berlin faces in an U-Bahn while the audio track whispers the depicted persons’ thoughts to us. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of that sequence while riding mass transit in Berlin–the mood is far more somber here than in New York, and I thought Wenders captured it beautifully. For my photo essay, I wanted to examine the U-Bahn as a public place in which people often wear their “private” faces; I wanted to shoot all the subjects through the windows not just because of the pretty reflected-light effects but also to explore the border between inside and outside, of capturing a surface while trying to peer beneath it.
The final shot is a self-portrait, my reflection as captured in the windows of the U-Bahn in motion.
You can see the slide show as a full screen presentation by clicking on the “View All Images” tab, which takes you to the Slide.com website.
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Bio
Daniel Mufson is an American freelance writer, translator, and editor. He lives in Berlin. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Village Voice, Washington D.C.’s City Paper, American Theatre, TDR, PAJ, and Germany’s Tageszeitung and Theater Heute, among others. He has translated plays, art criticism, and business texts. He is also the editor of Reza Abdoh, an anthology about an Iranian-American director and playwright, published by Johns Hopkins University Press under its PAJ imprint. He was the managing editor of Theater Magazine for two years in the 1990s, and founded and edited the (now defunct) online publication AlternativeTheater.com.
Daniel Mufson studied English and American History and Literature at Harvard. He holds an MFA and DFA (Doctor of Fine Arts) in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama. More recently, he earned a Master’s degree in Kulturjournalismus (Cultural Journalism) at the Universität der Künste, having written a thesis on the depiction of foreigners, primarily asylum-seekers, on East German television after the fall of the Wall. He is currently writing a book on the war on terror.
Email: mufson [at] gmail.com
“Notes from Berlin” Blog: http://nyc-berlin.blogspot.com/
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