Monday February 27, 2006

Train in Vain

New York artist and friend-in-law Neil Goldberg (he and Alexandra are pals, although we have never met) has created a series of photographs based on a familiar, yet heartbreaking, theme: missing the subway. He spent hours in subway stations, capturing the faces of New Yorkers at the precise moment of letdown. Selections from the “Missing the Train” series will be on display as part of the “Welcome Home” group show, which opens Saturday at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in Chelsea. I was intrigued, so I emailed Neil a few questions about the project:

How did you get the idea for this series?
I don’t remember the exact moment when I had the idea, but it was probably (surprise surprise) while watching someone miss the train. I’ve always been interested in disappointment as a theme. We’re all filled with hopes and desires, and life often has other plans for us, so what do we do with that? I think it gets to something basic and huge about being alive. To see those big issues played out over something as overlooked and ordinary as missing the train is especially interesting to me. I love the way the expressions in some of these photographs have something in common with the faces you’d see in Renaissance paintings depicting religious suffering or ecstasy. That was something completely unexpected. This was originally going to be a video project, but when I saw the freeze frames of those expressions, I wanted to do stills.

Did you setup in the subway or did you take the pictures when the opportunity arose?
I set up on the platform at various stations and waited and waited. It was just like fishing. Doing this for hours on end, I was struck by how many people don’t, in fact, miss the train. I would actually find myself starting to root for people not to make it, which is a troubling thing to find yourself doing. Also, by the end of the project I felt I’d developed a sixth sense about who was going to catch their train and who wasn’t. That was disturbing, too.

Did you run into any problems with the new restrictions on taking photographs in the subway?
… I noticed something really different about shooting this footage compared to the many projects I taped in public in the years prior. And, of course, it’s got something to do with 9/11. Up until then, except for the occasional crazy person convinced I was trying to steal his identity, I never encountered anything but pure New York blasé-ness. But with this project, I’d get a lot of hostile questions from passengers and was shooed along by cops pretty much once a morning.

Are there any people more disappointed than people who have just missed the subway?
Well, yeah. But if you’re looking for the highly-distilled essence of disappointment, there’s nothing better that I know of. It’s fleeting, but it’s 100 proof.

Another train is always coming. Why do people get so upset?
I hear you—but we should talk the next time it happens to you.

Posted by jim at 10:46 AM ||