The subway in any major city is a conduit, where thousands of lives flow like water through pipes in the journey from past to future. The subway station, however, is like a purgatory - a present-tense place where the journey temporarily hands in teh balance as one waits on the platform, maybe reading a book or reading the looks on the faces of passersby. Some people are hardened by years of public transportation; they pay no mind to who or what is happening around them. Others cant help but assume the posture of human curiosity in such spaces and find fascinating the fleeting masses of strangers. Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, belongs to a third category altogether. He surpasses the instinct to merely people watch and goes beyond to create elaborately curated photo documentaries of people moving through a particular station. The footage that he captures is true-real people passion through a real subway station - but the art that he makes from the video footage turns into a sociological exercise wherein people are organized by gender, style and color of clothing and then regrouped into patterned panoramas, as the gallery refers to them.
dailyserving.com/2010/05/pablo-zuleta-zahr-event-horizon/