W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #luismallo, #subway, #knitting, #passengers

The subway portraits by Walker Evans and Helen Levitt are fine but not as masterful Luis Mallo’s “Passengers”.  These were made mostly in the mid-1990s.  They are not really typologies like the Bechers or Blossfelt might make but rather, sly studies of New Yorkers, how they dress and sit and keep to themselves as they travel underground.  They read, they hold packages and purses, and they keep their hands in their laps.  Here one of them knits.

Time is such an integral part of photography, and the artist is able to illustrate that literally in a film sequence that lightly references Muybridge.  If this were used to demonstrate how to knit, apparently it would be wrong; the artist later discovered that the sequence is off somehow. The position of the right hand in the fourth frame breaks the horizon and makes it dramatic..

The “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care” Macbeth is about renewal; the knitter here is like a mythic figure intent on the continuity of life.  (Or the opposite, a modern Madame Defarge contemplating the worst. Or Alexander the Great sorting out the Gordian knot.)  It is like a piece of music that suddenly but intentionally misses a beat.

Whatever, the series is poetic and, as great photographs do, its transcends its basis as five photographs on a page or wall.

©2020

#somereallygoodones, #theunseeneye, #wmhunt, #collectiondancingbear, #collectionblindpirate, #greatphotographs, #howilookatphotographs, #photographsfromtheunconsicous, #collectingislikerunningaroundinathunderstormhopingyoullbehitbylightning, #aphotographsogooditmakesyoufartlightning, #photographychangedmylifeitgavemeone, #luismallo, #subway, #knitting, #passengers