Commuter Motions is a photographic series that attempts to frame the intangible spirit of our urban environment through the capture of a commute.
Peter Ydeen: Commuter Motions
Grandma and Grandpa’s House
“When we got up the nerve to crack the door open, we were immediately met with the smell of air that hadn’t been smelled in a long time: a mix of dust, musk, and cedar — a whiff that gave a sense, even to a kid, of past lives and an odor that we didn’t experience in the city, where every space seemed to be in constant use and never remained closed off for long.”
Esther Bubley: Put Me Down With People
“Put me down with people, and it’s just overwhelming,” Bubley exclaimed in an interview. Like most great photojournalists, she found her art in everyday life.
Beneath the Streets — Helen Levitt’s Subway Photographs
“Helen Levitt’s pictures haunt like intimate ghosts – ever present, never forceful, curious, receptive.”
Alexandria, The End of the Affair
“I sit on the wall and watch a fisherman wrangle his net; the sea is dark and a little choppy, and I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.”
Cones
“The cones began to be symbolic surrogates for human presence … or absence. Their serendipitous placement and interaction in their surroundings was somewhat surreal.”
All that is Solid
“A starting point, for artists or for anyone else, might be simply learning to look around where you live now. – Lucy Lippard” Photographs and their stories from Michael Acker.
Ripples on the Nile
The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends on the seemingly eternal flow of the longest river in Africa. I wanted to learn of the potential risks posed by climate change on rural Egypt. I also wanted a photo or two, and, an anecdote would be good.
Hardly a Day’s Journey
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
July Issue, 2023
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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