A Parallel Planets piece by Unknown
Parallel Planets presents Hermes Pichon
in Mental Memoirs: Transitory Universe
Mentioned: the effervescence of transit stations, a bubble of calm, and a maze of tunnels
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"From stations to stations and lines to lines, these pictures are the work of the photographer’s eye lost in the meanders of the subway of one of the world's biggest metropolis.
When you get inside the New York subway for the first time, you are instantly sucked in, swallowed up by the mass of travelers. You must stop for a moment, against the incessant flow of passengers…
Take your time to realize and understand. On a single platform several lines can pass to different directions or different stop in the same direction…
You could easily get lost, intentionally or not, but it is also an amazing show, the effervescence of transit stations to the desert trains at the end of lines, it is a universe by itself.
Metro New York as the city, is a condensed variety.
It contains a mix of New York’s 5 boroughs. From the Bronx to Manhattan, it is a huge melting pot that never stops. This is 4.5 million human beings on 1355 km of rail distributed among 369 stations, day and night, just like the City that never sleeps.
It is a constant flow of people traveling without moving, huge crowds, packed, immobile in metal train-sets, that run on miles of rails, passing over East River and traveling hours or only minutes in the city’s arteries.
They sometimes take, in the tumult of machinery and announcements, a moment of rest in the pages of a book, in the playlist of their smartphones or in few minutes of sleep, they recreate a bubble of calm in the permanent agitation. With an often long journey ahead of them, everyone find how to occupy those long miles that separate them from their destination. In the dark tunnels, time stops, only the train continues to run.
This series of black and white photography was completely realized with a 35mm lens in the New York City Subway. I wanted to transmit the atmosphere of the maze of tunnels I traveled, between open pit stations, tunnel and bridges, elevated railways, it is on this network that are taken all these pictures and that’s what this series is about, the Metro and those who use it…" -- Hermes Pichon on his photo series, New York Subway
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