Faces in Transit

I took these pictures in 2009 for a course at the Universität der Künste.

One of my favorite film sequences is from Himmel ueber Berlin (Wings of Desire), directed by Wim Wenders: the camera pans across a number of mostly somber Berlin faces in a 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 aesthetic reflections of light but also to explore the border between inside and outside, of capturing a surface while trying to peer beneath it. Like most students, I thought I was having an original idea, but I’ve since seen other photographs of this ilk. I still like mine, though.

The final shot is a self-portrait, my reflection as captured in the windows of the U-Bahn in motion.