[I am trying to view more art]
Andrew Bush.

[Mother trying to look after son at 31 mph on Rodeo Road
in Los Angeles at 10:28 a.m. on a Tuesday in February 1997]

I keep encountering Andrew Bush’s photographs in various corners of the internet.  His series Vector Portraits is instantly arresting, a beautiful sort of update of Walker Evans’ celebrated Many Are Called (quietly snapped images of the anonymous subway riders of the mid-twentieth century).  Evans thought himself an “apologetic voyeur.”  The images are cockeyed but exceedingly earnest, and are a joy to view. (A nice review of the Evans book, here.)

Andrew Bush is also depicting commuters, but in this age of highways and SUVs, he turns to the motorists of America’s roadways and peers into their windows to get a glimpse.  Everything changes at this speed.  Though the subjects are rarely any more aware of the camera, so it seems, than Evans’ often-dozing or lost-in-thought subway passengers, the process hardly seems subtle.  A flash brilliantly picks out the profiles of each of his subjects — it’s the blast of light that allows the viewer access to this otherwise sealed and private space.  Bush states that each portrait was taken at 50 to 70 mph — the background is thrust into blur, while each car is quite carefully framed (seemingly antithetical to making decisions at such speed).  In the end, Bush gets caught by the subject’s eye more than once. Moving alongside at equal velocity is the same as standing still, and its not such a private space after all.

[Woman rolling to a stoplight at Wilshire Boulevard and Lafayette Park Place
in Hollywood at 2:38-­2:39 p.m. on January 18, 1997]