Stations: Praha
When you think of good public transit, I doubt you think of Praha. Or maybe you do, but you picture its extensive network of trams. But the city has an extensive metro system too, and in the city center each station is boldly adorned in the colors of the lines serving it. The whole aesthetic is 1970’s…something. It’s great.
Train stations are liminal spaces, an intersection of people leaving and people returning, people beginning a journey and people completing one.
There is a striking symmetry to this liminality, in both time and space. The temporal symmetry of departing and arriving, of traveling in one direction and the other, is mirrored in the formal symmetry of the structure of train stations, and of the trains themselves. Railways are pairs of tracks; tracks are pairs of rails. To accommodate travelers headed in either direction, platforms might be single, set between the tracks, or double, set to either side. The escalator going up balances the escalator going down. Trains have cabs on each end (often) so they can travel in either direction, and seats on each side with an aisle down the middle (mostly).
In these images, I sought to create an almost cinematic rendering of my subjects from sometimes mundane and sometimes surprising angles, with the aim of capturing and accentuating the symmetries I found.
These images and more are collected in Stations, a hard-bound, layflat stitched volume with images an incredible 50cm x 20cm in size.
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