I think I came across Peter Snyder’s motorist photos before the similarly themed work of Andrew Bush, and maybe didn’t even realize they were different works when recalling these portraits of travelers framed by their car windows, when I wrote about the Vector Portraits.
Taking another look at Snyder’s series Idling, it’s clear that he is portraying a quite different component of the experience commuting by car. Stop lights. Intersections. Traffic jams. This work turns out to be much more in the tradition of Evans’s subway portraits… though of course those were portraits of people going somewhere. These people are stuck — even if the subway ride was routine and passive and a period to be lost in thought. Idling shows how travelers are forced into this passive, powerless state, even in the autonomous automobile.
It’s interesting to see that Snyder shows a number of people doing something else as they wait, grasping at something to do with their hands or occupy their minds — reading, eating, talking on the phone. Otherwise, there’s a quiet desperation or an emerging tension in their faces; stir-craziness settles in. Or at least, like Evans’ portraits, the face is so blank, one can project all sorts of things onto it.
Snyder writes of this work, “There’s a collective sense of living-as-waiting, a continual holding of the breath, in anxious anticipation of the next disaster. This is the big waiting — the stuck feeling, the giving over of control — that mirrors and sometimes leaks out into the small waiting for the light to change.”
