Street Photography and Public Transport

'Street Photography and Public Transport

This photographic attitude possesses different fields of action and in this book we have decided to focus on such modes of public transport as buses, the subway and trains. These modes of collective travel mark the dynamics of days, while for us they have become mobile and improvised photographic sets. The content of these captured images goes beyond that of aesthetics and also exudes a profound charge of socio-anthropological information. The restricted spaces of public transport help to observe the spatial relationships between bodies and the reactions of certain people, discovering a shared code in the way they look and/or hear each other, but above all revealing the codes whereby passengers brush or maintain a distance from the other bodies surrounding them.
This theme of corporeality demonstrates what Richard Sennett claimed was a major contemporary problem, with sensory deprivation acting as a curse that reinforces the tactile sterility that ends up afflicting the urban environment. The cold feeling of alienation that we feel on boarding a railway car or bus seems to be rooted in this fear of brushing against the other. When we travel crushed between the bodies of strangers, we feel that we are in the midst of chaos and grumpily reject this. Our aim is to re-establish a code of order by seeking distance with other passengers and voluntary, desirable non-communication. This lack of contact provides comfort to travellers because it results in order and control over the environment, although it involves the high price of isolation.
In line with this discourse, images taken on public transport often show moods of ostracism and circumspection, a vivid expression of a language that represses through exclusion. Urban experience is documented through the synthesis of difference, complexity and strangeness. Thus, the scenes that we have captured on public transport prove to be reality bites that are difficult to digest, because they illustrate unkind truths, such as the fact of discerning that diversity, per se, does not encourage human beings to interact. Straightforward individuation has led to urban individualism and the silence of a city. We therefore intensely experience this discursive absence on public transport, with the gaze having replaced the word. The public aspect of transport, that shared territory, is a purely visual space with only an exchange of looks, but no words of dialogue. Moreover, when someone does talk to another passenger, he or she is judged by the silent and silencing gazes of other passengers.'

http://passengers-streetphotography.com/street-photography-y-el-transporte-publico/

Whilst doing my research, I came across this article which I feel raises some very significant points, some of which I will kind of contradict my own work and its meaning. The final sentence 'when someone does talk to another passenger, he or she is judged by the silent and silencing gazes of other passengers' is the most significant. There's no doubting we all feel alone when travelling, and most people would prefer it to stay that way, but even when we do try to make the journey less monotonous by talking to someone, that person instantly becomes a 'weirdo' and people turn their noses up, we simply can't win!