Adam Magyar, Stainless

Back in January of this year, Joshua Hammer provided a wonderful description of photographer Adam Magyar’s recent series, Stainless, in his Matter profile of the the artist. Drawing a distinction between the objectivity of Magyar’s digital scans—of people waiting on subway platforms and entire subway cars full of passengers—and the subjectivity inherent to Misha Gordin’s nightmarish and totalitarian Crowds, Hammer said:

Magyar, an admirer of Gordin’s work, also creates black-and-white photographs and video images permeated with a similar brooding quality, though his human beings are bound not by political systems, but by the limits of perception.


Particularly in the video excerpts from Stainless, Magyar’s technical approach yields one of the most stunning deployments of visual parallax I’ve ever witnessed. The everydayness of the scene is leveraged against the miraculousness of perspectival change; as more distant figures slip behind ones in closer proximity, the entire scene is continuously reconfigured without much time elapsing. That the video is in super-slow motion is less reflective of any affective or psychological state than it is revealing of the visual implications of material motion. When watching, we quickly stop seeing people and start attending to how people are seen. Perception itself, our finite perspective within material reality, becomes the focus once we realize the movement of photographic subjects implicates the movement of the photographer whose perspective we share.

Adam Magyar – Stainless, Alexanderplatz (excerpt), 2011 from Adam Magyar on Vimeo.

When we consider this video in relation to his ‘still’ images of entire subway cars full of passengers, the notion of movement is once again inverted. For in order to digitally scan the entirety of the car, we realize that Magyar’s still photograph must have been a photograph in motion. It’s almost as if the Stainless project puts back into photography that which interpretive discourse and psychological projection has taken out: the material implications of our single point perspective on the world.

As Magyar reveals in a presentation for PopTech on his art and its techniques,

I was always interested in the … unimportant, ignored moments. Because I think this enormous thing that always surrounds me, and I’m never going to understand, it’s always there; it’s so amazing; it’s a gift always, and it’s in all the moments.

Perhaps Magyar’s enormous and ungraspable thing is, in fact, “in all the moments” (in their being what they are) precisely because of our observation of all the moments in which we are.

© 2014, Sean Peuquet. All rights reserved.

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