Chris Marker "Passengers" at Peter Blum
March 30, 2011
I love Chris Marker, even if he seems to have sunk into a kind of late-career brooding on the impossibility of human communion. But no one can tap into the evocative power and metaphoric charge of still images quite like the director of "La Jetee." If Marker's previous show of photos at Peter Blum, "Staring Back," formed a kind of photo essay reflecting on his own career and the weight of history (I wrote about it, here), the new show "Passengers" is more public in its subject matter, focusing his lens on riders traveling on the Paris Metro, capturing fleeting moments of intimacy and alienation, people heading home or to work, surrounded by fellow commuters but locked into their own thoughts, with public transportation evidently standing as a metaphor for the human journey. It also happens to be Marker's first series with color photography, and the photos look lovely.