22.4.13

Passengers by John Schabel

John Schabel  / United Photo Press
When the planes are in the sky, far away, we can hear their noises, see its lights and the plane itself very small.

Photographer John Schabel, with a lens mega super telephoto (500mm reflex lens and a 2x tele, zooming 1000mm), captured monochrome images that depict passengers looking through small windows.

The series entitled Passengers (PAX, in free translation), shows in great detail, clicks still produced in the 90s, of such peculiarity surrendered to the production of a book.

The photographs, combining the melancholy of a black and white, depict the different types of people and their looks sincere and thoughtful through the small window of the plane. Follow below.

"John Schabel’s series of photographs depicting anonymous airline passengers effectively captures the curious blend of impersonal efficiency and poignant humanity that pervades the experience of contemporary commercial air travel.

Like products on an assembly line, the planes carrying Schabel’s subjects churn down the runway; and with the same regularity the individual passengers emerge, identically framed, from his camera and onto the gallery wall.

Interestingly, it is precisely this mechanized process that lays bare the active, but often overlooked, emotional and intellectual relationship between human beings and flight.”
 
— Laura M. Andre

UNITED PHOTO PRESS