In the End, You Always Reach Your Destination

“Doesn’t anyone notice? Doesn’t anyone complain?” I’m often asked these questions when people see my photos of passengers. I understand them, to some extent. Even though the spaces where we photograph are public, the moments are intimate. In the madness of urban overcrowding, we seek intimacy in the anonymity of the crowd. Observing that space seems unsettling to those who consider it private. It is assumed that other passengers are not interested in their companions either, that everyone shares the unspoken rule of non-existence within the same space… Perhaps it is more of a shared non-perception, a self-imposed blindness. If we didn’t carry cameras but looked with the same presence that this book has when looking through our eyes, we would likely face the same issue—a transgression. Someone might smile, yes… but they would be the exception.

In the city, and especially in public transport, looking is a sin. A gaze is always a mirror, and I believe we don’t want to see ourselves in that subway, on that bus. A photograph is almost the same. The book, an inevitable consequence, exposes those intimate moments of passengers scattered across the world. Passengers who seem not to want to be there. Their minds are certainly elsewhere. But right there, we are truly present. Because we cannot stop being witnesses of our time, and we cannot look away when faced with these spaces, these gazes, these escapes.

Some of us have thought deeply about photographing, about being, about the city, about mobility, before starting to publish our photographs. Others simply follow their instinct. I believe we all share a mix of necessity, obsession, and, to varying degrees, a conviction that our time must be preserved for the future. We feel drawn to this space where souls flow through public transport.

The Passengers trilogy exists to document how we have experienced the years of mass mobile device adoption in urban spaces. So that these photographs may, in the distant future, blend with those of Walker Evans and paint a visual timeline that will not only show the evolution of passengers but also how photography, editing, and visual arts transform from a singular author-editor model to participatory, online, and linguistically and geographically dispersed processes.

The web will also bear witness to what now seems like an excessive accumulation—an archive of over twelve thousand photographs in six years, created by 76 authors from 45 countries and 339 cities. Yet, soon enough, this number will seem normal or even small.

Passengers Vol. III concludes the trilogy with photographs taken between 2013 and 2015. The book features 42 images by 12 authors, selected from an initial pool of 7,515 images by 71 photographers. The first selection round took over a year. Editors could vote to accept an image as part of the new book through an individual online process. After so much selection work, we weren’t sure if we could create another book with a cohesive thread… until we saw the images chosen by the four editors together. It was a surprise to find coherence among those seven thousand photos and between the four of us. The second, third, and fourth rounds of editing were done in person, working with around 300 printed photographs.

Through the trilogy, we can see how mobile aesthetics evolve, how devices become part of daily life, how cameras capture more, how photographers change their distances, and how editors grow older in @passengers’ photos. ;-)

Passengers has been a project that has taken us through many stations over nine years. It has helped us bridge distances with our fellow photographers in many countries, and we hope it serves to bring a deeper understanding of how city dwellers have lived the beginning of the century.